Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained his rationale for changing the company’s content moderation policies during Friday’s episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Earlier, on Tuesday, Zuckerberg posted a video message to Meta’s blog announcing that he would replace fact-checkers with community notes, a system similar to what Elon Musk uses on X.
The announcement was criticized by dozens of third-party fact-checking groups, which signed an open letter to Zuckerberg denouncing the changes as a “step backward” for accuracy.
Zuckerberg told Rogan his reason for the changes was “censorship.”
“You only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice,” he said. “It goes back to our original mission, it’s just give people the power to share and make people more open and connected.”
Zuckerberg said that over the past 10 years, there’s been a greater push for “idealogical-based censorship” on the platform, fueled especially by the 2016 election, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic. “We just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to start censoring content on ideological grounds,” he said.
Zuckerberg initially gave into the pressure, believing it stemmed from genuine concerns about misinformation. After the 2016 election, he implemented a system of third-party fact-checkers tasked with correcting statements like “the earth is flat.” However, the system quickly veered into gray areas, leading to accusations that the company’s moderators were biased.
Pressure on Meta’s content moderation policies continued, reaching a fever pitch during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Biden administration rolled out its vaccine program. “While they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it,” Zuckerberg said. “They pushed us super hard to take down things that were, honestly, were true.”
That means he has been considering changing Meta’s content moderation policies for a while now.
“I think that this is going to be pretty durable because, at this point, we’ve just been pressure tested on this stuff for the last 8 to 10 years with like these huge institutions just pressuring us,” he said. “I feel like this is kind of the right place to be going forward.”
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