By Robert McGreevy (Daily Caller)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent shift rightward appears to be little more than window dressing, as his company’s policies still favor mass censorship.

Zuckerberg rocked the online world in early January 2025 when he announced a grand policy change, vowing that his companies would pivot from their knee-jerk censorship reflexes.

Meta famously suspended President Donald Trump from its platforms following the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. The company defended the decision at the time by labelling Trump’s online presence as “a serious risk to public safety.”

Trump sued Meta for the action and ended up scoring a $25 million settlement in January.

Meta also took broad measures to restrict user content related to COVID-19 that did not align with narratives coming from major world health agencies. (RELATED: Zuckerberg Refused To Name Them, But A Report Found The People Who Helped Biden Censor Americans On Facebook)

Meta employees regularly asked the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to help them decide which content would be allowed on its platforms.

Zuckerberg later expressed regret for that strain of content moderation. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true,” he told podcaster Lex Friedman in 2023.

This admission, which followed Trump’s first major polling surge for the 2024 presidential election, kicked off a spell of media appearances and publicity moves that displayed Zuckerberg’s thoughtful reconsideration of his digital empire’s censorship regime.

The ideological renewal culminated in a Jan. 2025 video where Zuckerberg proclaimed, “It’s time to get back to our roots in free expression on Facebook and Instagram.”

Here is the full video from Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of censorship and misinformation policies.

I highly recommend you watch all of it as tonally it is one of the biggest indications of “elections have consequences” I have ever seen pic.twitter.com/aYpkxrTqWe

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) January 7, 2025

Despite the grand decree, Meta’s current community standards still leave the door wide open for censorship.

Following Zuckerberg’s January video, Meta reformed its policy on “hate speech,” a euphemism that the company previously utilized to mass censor users.

The censor-first policy garnered ire from both the right and the left, with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) writing, “Facebook will do no better at serving as the arbiter of truth versus misinformation, and we should remain wary of its power to deprioritize certain posts or to moderate content.”

Meta deleted the hate speech section in its terms of service and, in an ostentatious mea culpa, acknowledged that too many users wound up in “Facebook jail ” for “harmless content.”

However, the current community standards still contain a comprehensive section instructing users not to post content which would fall under its “hateful conduct” policy, though those policies were relaxed regarding the issues of gender identity, sexual orientation and religion.

As for censorship related to public health, a spokesperson for Meta told the Daily Caller that the company fully abandoned its previous policies around Covid-19 misinformation in response to 2022 guidance from its Oversight Board.

That guidance read, in part, “Given Meta’s insistence that it takes a single, global approach to COVID-19 misinformation, the Board concludes that, as long as the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to declare COVID-19 an international public health emergency, Meta should maintain its current policy.”

Despite Zuckerberg’s confession about truthful speech being banned under that policy, Meta’s community guidelines still contain a section on “harmful health misinformation” that covers non-Covid-related public health issues. The policy reads, “We consult with leading health organizations to identify health misinformation likely to directly contribute to imminent harm to public health and safety.”

Meta did not address a Daily Caller question about whether or not they are still working in conjunction with the same public health agencies they did during the Covid-19 pandemic or whether they’ve consulted more stakeholders.

As part of the company’s bullying and harassment policy, one may also find themselves on the wrong end of a suspension if they produce content that “degrades or expresses disgust toward individuals who are depicted in the process of, or right after, menstruating, urinating, vomiting, or defecating.”

Additionally, Meta still has a lengthy section on “Misinformation,” an oft-used term for its COVID-19 censorship, much of which, Zuckerberg later revealed, came at the behest of the Biden administration. (RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg Tells Joe Rogan That Biden Admin Would ‘Scream’ And ‘Curse’ At Meta Employees To Censor ‘True’ Content)

The misinformation section states “there is no way to articulate a comprehensive list of what is prohibited.”

Still, the section lays out a comprehensive list of categories of misinformation, including that which relates to vaccines and to “election and census integrity.”

Meta’s January policy shift preceded by one month an official request for public comments on Big Tech censorship from Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, Andrew Ferguson.

An FTC request for public comment often precedes formal action, signaling that Zuckerberg may not have done enough to remove himself from conservative crosshairs.

“In case there was any doubt, Big Tech is on notice. We do not intend to take our foot off the gas any time soon. The days of censorship and monopolies are over,” a senior FTC official previously told the Daily Caller.

The FTC is also moving forward with an anti-trust lawsuit filed during Trump’s first term against Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, with the trial date set for April 14.

After spending much of the previous four years fighting President Joe Biden’s FTC chair, Lina Khan, Zuckerberg appeared to be courting conservative favor coming into the new administration.

Leading up to Meta’s policy shift, he publicly displayed a number of behaviors and stunts that seemingly appealed to conservatives.

He criticized the Biden administration’s censorship requests while appearing on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. He frequently posted video clips of him participating in jiu-jitsu and lifting weights. He officially came out as a libertarian. (RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg’s Embrace Of Physical Violence Has Made Him A Better Man)

 

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Zuckerberg also appointed numerous Republicans and Trump-allies to positions of influence within his company. He added UFC president Dana White, who is close friends with Trump, to Meta’s board.

Some question the authenticity of Zuckerberg’s moves. Rather than an earnest attempt at correcting previous mistakes, Zuckerberg’s January reversal was simply “a free expression magic trick,” Eric Thomas, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrenceville, wrote.

“He crowns his company as a nation state with the power to censor. And he is crowned as the policy-writing king,” Thomas said.

Many of the policies used to limit right-of-center speech on Facebook are still in place. Meta is in the process of ditching its fact-checking program, but is instituting a community notes feature in line with X.

During the 2020 election, when Facebook — at the top-story-gain-favor-biden-harris-admin-house-report/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">behest of the FBI and Biden administration — limited the visibility of the New York Post’s groundbreaking Hunter Biden laptop story, they did so under the auspices of reducing the spread of misinformation.

Facebook employees dismissed the story as the “exact content expected for hack and leak,” according to internal chat logs obtained by the House Judiciary Committee.

Meta’s new community standards still maintain a policy on “Information obtained from hacked sources.”

The policy states the company will remove any content “claimed by the poster or confirmed to come from a hacked source, regardless of whether the affected person is a public figure or a private individual.”

The company’s anti-hate speech action peaked in 2021, with Meta taking action against over 95 million pieces of content that year, according to Meta transparency records. Those actions declined to just over 25 million in 2023.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect Meta’s current “hateful conduct” policy as well as the exact reason it censored the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story.