If Elon Musk rained down dollars on Donald Trump’s campaign, put the social network world, Mark Zuckerberg is following suit more and more openly. The boss of Meta (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp) has just announced major changes in his group’s moderation policy… in the name of freedom of expression brandished by the Trumpists to better allow the free circulation of hatred and fake news.
“We are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community ratings, similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting with the United States”, he declared, Tuesday January 7, in a message on social networks, castigating, in unison with the Trump camp, “auditors (Who) have been too politically oriented and have done more to reduce trust than to improve it, particularly in the United States. “The recent elections appear to be a cultural tipping point once again prioritizing freedom of expression,” he added to dot the i’s, in reference to the Republican’s return to the White House.
The group should also review and “simplify” its rules regarding content on all of its platforms and “put an end to a number of limits regarding topics, such as immigration and gender, which are no longer in dominant discourses”.
Multiple signals in the direction of the Trump camp
“This is a major setback for content moderation policy, at a time when misinformation and dangerous content are changing faster than ever,” worried the co-founder of the Center for Information Resilience (CIR), Russ Burley, in a press release. Conversely, Elon Musk of course welcomed these decisions, expressing a “it’s cool” on X. Meta and Facebook “have made a lot of progress”for his part judged, Tuesday, the Republican president-elect, before responding ” probably “ to a journalist who asked him if he believed that the boss of Meta had taken these resolutions because of the threats he had made in the past.
And this new moderation policy is not the only signal sent by Mark Zuckerberg. He donated one million dollars to the fund financing the mandate’s inauguration ceremonies, scheduled for January 20. Meta also appointed Trump loyalist Joel Kaplan to head its public affairs, replacing former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg who resigned.
The head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Dana White, also close to Donald Trump, has also joined the board of directors of the group which intends, like Elon Musk, to move its teams “trust and security » from California to very conservative Texas. Not to mention that Donald Trump’s Facebook account, suspended in the wake of the attack on the Capitol in 2021, was reactivated at the beginning of 2023.
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