Remember when Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were going to fight each other in a cage match, after Zuckerberg launched "Threads" a couple of years ago? It wasn't just their physical prowess being tested, it was also a symbolic battle between the tech world's Left and Right. "[They] have become proxies for a lot of civic, political, social issues," one professor said at the time.  

Well, the fight never happened. But in the business world, you could now argue that Musk has won. Zuckerberg has just come out with a series of major changes that his company, Meta, will start making to its Facebook and Instagram platforms. In a nutshell, the platforms are going "back to their roots of free expression," Zuckerberg said in a five-minute video posted this morning.  

What does that mean in practice? "We're going to get rid of fact checkers, and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X," Zuckerberg said. That's a direct embrace of Musk's approach to content moderation on X (formerly known as Twitter). "The fact-checkers are too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they have created," Zuckerberg explained--which is exactly what Musk and other critics of the platforms have complained about for years.  

Meta will also be getting rid of restrictions on topics like gender and immigration that "have become out of step with mainstream discourse," Zuckerberg said. Its filters will now focus primarily on "illegal and high-security violations" instead of hot-button social issues. "By dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms," Zuckerberg added.  

In addition, Meta is bringing back "civic content"--in other words, posts about politics. "We stopped recommending these posts," because they were making people "stressed," Zuckerberg said. "But it feels like we're in a new era now...and people want to see this content again." And finally, he's moving the content moderation team out of California to Texas (Musk is already relocating his companies there) in order to build the public's trust that they won't be biased.  

On top of all that, Zuckerberg is adding Dana White--a big Trump supporter and donor who was supposed to officiate the cage match that never happened--to Meta's board. Elections indeed have consequences.  

But there is a larger fight beginning to emerge here, and an extremely important one. "We are going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies, and trying to censor more," Zuckerberg said in the video. 

"Europe," he said, "has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there." Latin America has secret courts to censor content, and China's simply bans Meta's apps, he added. "That's why it's been so difficult over the past four years, when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us, and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further." 

"Now, we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it," Zuckerberg said. 

Here's the problem: no other countries he mentioned are remotely interested in that happening. Musk is the ire of Britain's prime minister this very moment for his comments on X about their "grooming gangs" scandal. Last summer, the European Commissioner warned Musk that simply broadcasting his interview with candidate Trump on X to Europeans could violate their "Digital Services Act." 

If Zuckerberg truly believes in protecting free expression globally, outside of U.S. legal jurisdiction, he has some very big battles to fight. If he settles for freer expression in the U.S., only to reverse course if the political winds change again, then he will simply be remembered as a shape-shifting businessman.  

See you at 1 p.m! 

Kelly 

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