Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he will no longer be ‘fact-checking’ on Meta, signaling a significant shift from his previous actions, such as banning Trump from the platform, to now being a strong supporter of the president-elect.

Zuckerberg has acknowledged that Meta and Facebook previously censored conservative viewpoints on a large scale. However, he has now pledged to transform both platforms into champions of free speech.

In a brief video message posted on his Facebook profile, the 40-year-old stated, ‘We are going back to our core principles by focusing on minimizing errors, simplifying our guidelines, and promoting open expression on our platforms.’

‘More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.’

Like X, the shift will allow users on the sites to call out posts that are potentially misleading and need more context.

The missive appears to be part of a full court press to change Meta, social media and the internet itself for the second Trump era.  

Zuckerberg threatened governments in Europe, South America and China that Meta would ‘work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.’ 

He claimed that foreign governments have been demanding Facebook be censored or even taken down and they will work with Trump to stop them. 

These aren’t the only moves that Zuckerberg has in the cards to make his company more Trump-friendly.  

Meta said it will relocate its trust and safety teams from liberal California to more conservative Texas, mirroring Elon Musk’s recent relocations.

‘That will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,’ Zuckerberg said.

The shift came as the 40-year-old tycoon has been making efforts to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, including donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund.

Zuckerberg recently donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, in a complete reversal on past relations between the two. 

The policy change, and the donation come after Zuckerberg sat down with the President-elect for dinner in Mar-a-Lago in November. 

On Monday, Zuckerberg added Dana White to Meta’s board of directors in another olive branch to Trump.  

Commentators on all sides agreed that this was a seismic shift for the future of social media. 

Conservative influencer Benny Johnson called it ‘enormous’ and ‘truly a shocking cultural realignment.’

Left-wing CNN media critic Brian Stelter announced that it would ‘reshape the entire internet’ and saying Zuckerberg was giving it a ‘MAGA makeover.’

Since sharing the policy shift on Tuesday morning, social media users have been reacting to the news with split opinions. 

One person posted: ‘Zuckerberg has fully switched teams. It’s a very big deal. He oversees 60%+ of US social media. What triggered this?’

Right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro added: ‘This is a sea change in the direction at Facebook. 

‘Zuckerberg spelled out his vision of free speech at Georgetown in 2019, to the consternation and shock of the Left; Facebook then proceeded to cave, engaging in mass censorship. The tide has turned. Good for Zuckerberg.’

Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him and threatening to retaliate against the tech billionaire once back in office.

Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, when asked if he believed the move was a response to his threats against Zuckerberg, Trump responded: ‘Probably, yeah.’

The Republican was kicked off Facebook following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by his supporters, though the company restored his account in early 2023.

Meta’s surprise announcement echoed long-standing complaints made by Trump’s Republican Party and X owner Musk about fact-checking, which many conservatives see as censorship.

They argue that fact-checking programs target right-wing voices, which has led to proposed laws in states like Florida and Texas to limit content moderation.

‘This is cool,’ Musk posted on his X platform after the announcement.

Zuckerberg, like several other tech leaders, has met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida ahead of his January 20 inauguration.

Meta has made several moves in recent days that are likely to please Trump’s team, such as appointing former Republican official Joel Kaplan to head up public affairs at the company.

He takes over from Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister.

Kaplan, in a statement Tuesday, insisted the company’s approach to content moderation had ‘gone too far.’

Meta will also ‘simplify’ its own policies to ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’. 

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media sites in the world that boast billions of users, as well as Threads.

Trump has long been critical of Meta for alleged instances of politically biased censorship against Republicans and conservatives.

Trump once supported a repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which provides legal immunity to social media companies over what its users post.

If it were repealed, this would open the door for anyone to sue social media companies like Meta for controversial content on their sites. Lawsuits could also target attempts to moderate such content.

Following the January 6 insurrection four years ago, Trump was suspended from Facebook for two years.

He was reinstated on the platform in 2023 months after Trump announced his third run for the White House, which was ultimately successful.

By July 2024, Meta fully removed all suspension penalties from Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram, citing the public’s need to hear from nominees for president.

Trump’s latest gripe with Meta came in July, after Facebook admitted they mistakenly censored an image of him with blood running down his ear after he was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

‘Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump “attempted assassination photo,” and got caught,’ Trump posted on social media at the time.

‘Same thing for Google,’ he claimed. ‘They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing big backlash over censorship claims.’

In August of last year Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration had demanded Facebook censor what they called ‘Covid misinformation’. 

He said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan that they’ll fight back against any attempts at censorship in the future and also admitted the company had ‘demoted’ stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

He wrote that the White House ‘repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree’. 

He said that this pressure ‘was wrong’ and says he regrets ‘that we were not more outspoken about it’. 

‘We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,’ he added.