Meta power move is about more than fact checking

A global tech war is not just semiconductors and AI, but also shared facts, the challenges of foreign interference, and treatment of women. Announcements last week by social media giant Meta – the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more – are revealing about technology, politics and power in 2025.

The headline change to content moderation has been met with dismay by fact checkers and disinformation experts. However, there were several additional policy announcements that offer insight into what we can expect from Meta – and probably the Trump administration – in the year ahead.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and new global policy chief, Joel Kaplan, a Republican strategist, couched a series of changes as an end to censorship and to enable users to engage in ideological dissent and political debate. However, the changes also look set to increase mis- and dis-information, social harms and abuse, as well as make accessing accurate information and truthful content more difficult. Meta changed its global “hateful conduct” policies, reducing safety guardrails intended to protect women, LGBTQ people and immigrants, among others. In Australia, these groups already experience online hate speech at more than double the national average. For women, it is a global experience we are sadly too familiar with.

Insulting and dehumanising rhetoric will now be accepted. For example the new policy says women may be referred to as property and immigrants called trash. Zuckerberg also appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast calling for more aggression and male energy in companies.

Meta has faced international scrutiny for its approach to hate speech and the policies had been built over time in response to terrorist attacks, incidents and state sponsored information campaigns. Fact checking is imperfect. It has also been shown to slow the spread of misinformation. In a world of rampant disinformation, hate (online and real) and state sponsored interference, every tool is needed to improve the resilience of our information ecosystem. Ideally, independent fact checking would be repaired and strengthened alongside other measures to complement each other. For example, banning deepfakes and AI generated political and electoral content as well as crowdsourcing information (i.e. “community notes”).

The removal of fact checking has set off alarm bells globally, including in India – which currently has the largest Meta user base of more than 378 million users, compared to 193 million in the United States. India is also one of Meta’s largest AI markets.

Indonesian experts slammed the decision and Australian commentators called to renegotiate media payments amid any increase of political news. Australian officials will no doubt be asking Meta questions for the news bargaining incentive given Meta’s position that users “don’t come to Facebook for news and political content.” Brazil also called on Meta to respond with details on news policies.

This underscores the global reach of such decisions. And the announcements are part of a pattern. Zuckerberg recalibrates Meta’s policies to match the prevailing political tone. In 2017, it was integrity initiatives and a manifesto on community-building. In 2021, it was deprioritising politics and news. Over the past few days, Meta and Amazon have axed their diversity initiatives.

Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all facing major anti-trust cases in the United States (as well as many others elsewhere). Each of these companies made unprecedented tech donations, of $1 million each, to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund.

It’s likely we’ll see where the limits on Presidential power are in this term.

Trump has committed to overturning the TikTok ban, despite the divestment order being passed in both Congress and the Senate with widespread bipartisan support. The Supreme Court held the case on January 10 – despite Trump’s request to delay the issue until after his inauguration – with a decision anticipated this week. It’s unclear whether Presidential authority could overturn the law, but a number of measures remain available to the incoming President. Trump recently posting infographics of his audience reach and engagement metrics in support of TikTok.

We can expect a change in the way US tech companies interact with national governments. The call by Zuckerberg in the past week for the EU to stop fining US companies for legal violations and for the United States to “push back on governments around the world” is one example. It was followed by Meta launching legal action against Irish regulator. Facebook looks to overturn the Data Protection Commission’s €251m fine. It’s unclear whether this “pushback” will occur with official US government support.

The EU is at a critical juncture. Meta’s announcements will test lawmakers resolve to the Digital Services Act, designed to protect civic discourse and electoral integrity in the digital age. Social media aren’t neutral platforms through which speech flows but “curated feeds based on algorithmic decision-making and priorities set by the owners”. X and now Meta are using this information power in new ways that declare war on facts, denigrate groups of people, enhance vulnerabilities for state sponsored interference, influence foreign politics and decrease inclusion and participation. Musk is using X to endorse and promote far-right political candidates in the United Kingdom and Germany.

We will see an increase in tension between democratic nations and US social media companies as the former attempt to assert their sovereignty and ability to enforce the rule of law – essential in democracies – and the latter, to appeal to Trump and simultaneously shape political movements around the globe.

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