Meta, the company which owns and operates social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook, plans to "dramatically reduce the amount of censorship" on their platforms, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced in a statement.

Zuckerberg said Meta would commit to prioritising free speech by getting rid of fact checkers, saying that they "have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created," adding that they will be replaced by "community notes similar to X."

The CEO continued, saying Meta will "work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more” and “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse."

Zuckerberg also criticised "an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative" in Europe.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more", he said. "A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.

“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech.”

 

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In 2024 Coimisiún na Meán, Ireland's new media regulator, announced a code of conduct for social media companies. Taoiseach Simon Harris said at the time that this would provide "an ability to hold directors personally responsible because essentially, these social media companies aren't actually faceless, as people who make a hell of a lot of money from them and that's fine, but they also do need to abide by the laws of the land and accept their responsibility."

The Taoiseach's comments came after threats were made to his family on Instagram in August. The social media platform took two days to remove the post, despite pressure from An Garda Síochána.

The European Union has also taken a firm stance in recent years, publishing a strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation in 2022 which "took into account the lessons learnt from the COVID19 crisis and Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine."