Mark Zuckerberg’s Eternal Apology Tour

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Facebook

In November 2016, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post responding to intense post-election scrutiny about how Facebook was handling moderation. “The bottom line is: We take misinformation seriously,” he wrote. While it was crucial not to “mistakenly restrict accurate content,” he continued, the company was planning to bolster its “technical systems” and had started reaching out to “respected fact-checking organizations” for help. On January 7, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg wrote another post responding to intense post-election scrutiny about how the platform was handling moderation. “Over the last several years, we have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies,” he said. “But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”

Well, it’s January 7, 2025, and new-look Zuck is posting again, responding to post-election scrutiny about how the platform handles moderation, only this time with a twist. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said in a new video:

The video is ostensibly a set of product announcements about Facebook and Instagram. The company is winding down its third-party fact-checking program, which employs — literally — outside fact-checking and media organizations to assess flagged content, and will rely more on a “more comprehensive community notes system”  that is “similar to X.” The company is going to “simplify” its content policies to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender” that are “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Meta will be “dialing back” filters that scan for “policy violations” to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on the platform.” The company is going to move its “trust and safety and content moderation” divisions from California to Texas, where there is “less concern about the bias of our teams,” a change that Zuckerberg suggests will “help us build trust.” Finally, Zuckerberg says, Meta is going to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

Zuckerberg isn’t being subtle here. The video premiered on Fox & Friends before an interview with Joel Kaplan, the former Bush administration staffer, Republican operative, and longtime Meta executive who recently replaced former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg as the company’s president of global affairs. Yesterday, Meta also announced the appointment of UFC head and major Trump supporter Dana White to its board of directors. Like a lot of tech companies and figures this time around, the company donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration. The incoming administration was reportedly tipped off about the video, which can be understood as a Facebook-style targeted ad with an audience of one: Donald Trump, who has previously suggested that Mark “Zuckerschmuck” should be in jail, claimed that his change of heart around banning TikTok was in part due to concerns that it could end up helping Meta, and has, borrowing the language of Democrats circa 2017, repeatedly accused Meta of “election interference” through content moderation. Meta isn’t just bracing for Trump’s return in a general sense — the FTC’s antitrust case against the company, which seeks to break it up, is set to go to trial in a few months.

Zuckerberg’s announcement is a clear product of big tech’s new Loyalty Era, timed to coincide with Trump’s ecstatic post-election-but-pre-inauguration celebratory period. It’s tempting and to some extent fair to also read into it a change of political sympathies in Zuckerberg, who is both being coldly strategic but also seems fairly fed up with liberal criticism, especially from his own employees; the content of one man’s soul notwithstanding, the video is clearly an attempt to signal a deeper change. This, too, is unsubtle, with Zuckerberg fully adopting the framing and language of his conservative antagonists. “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” he says, repeating the word censorship, which he has in the past tended to avoid or euphemize. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” he says, “and it’s gone too far, so I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.” Fact-checkers, whom the company hired in response to the “legacy media” writing “nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg says, “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.”

I don’t want to understate the importance of the head of America’s largest social-media company attempting to give his company, and himself, a new and more conservative political identity — these changes, to the extent they actually happen, will affect life on Meta’s platforms in real ways, potentially making the platforms more hospitable for some users (conservatives who share a lot of things about “immigration and gender” that were getting flagged before) and less for others (people for whom “immigration and gender” are perhaps understood as more than “topics” for discussion).

Users less attuned to the discourse around Meta’s edge-case moderation policies, however, might wonder what exactly its CEO is talking about: Their Facebook feeds are weird, personal, full of ads and spam and genuinely shocking levels of AI slop, but also people they sort of know saying all kinds of stuff, much of it not true. On Instagram, they’re scrolling through an endless supply of video, some of which is politically inflected but most of which is engagement-driven entertainment and sales content. That’s not to say that they don’t encounter censorship — on the contrary, what’s strange about these conversations to a typical user is that Meta’s platforms, like YouTube or TikTok, are plainly and broadly restrictive in a wide range of ways intended to appease advertisers (is “sexually suggestive” content free speech? Not to Meta!).

Photo: Fox News

The idea that Facebook, née Facemash, which rose to prominence as an elite-college networking site, has meaningful “roots” around “free expression” to “return” to, as Zuckerberg claims, is in part the continuation of a useful marketing strategy. Meta, alongside other social-media platforms, has borrowed the language of law, rights, and civil society to give the impression that it’s built something less grim and more trustworthy than a private commercial platform subject to the whims — financial, political, personal — of its owners and shareholders. This foundational bad faith has served to make discussions around social-media moderation and censorship less coherent and easier to hijack, giving critics with a range of priorities a fundamental and unaddressable inconsistency to exploit to great ends. Meta’s forced embrace, in 2025, of a similarly motivated, incoherent, and self-serving concept of platform speech is in this sense both fitting and deserved.

As someone who has been reporting on Meta’s contradictory approaches to censorship and speech since well before they were a matter of national political concern, though, what’s most striking is how familiar this is. In 2016, Zuckerberg wrote a contorted post in response to what he assessed as politicized backlash worth listening to; in 2021, Zuckerberg wrote a contorted post responding to what he assessed as politicized backlash worth listening to. In 2025, he isn’t just doing the same thing — in his video, he recounts how he always does this. His 2016 come-to-Jesus performance was, he suggests, driven by relentless media coverage and government pressure, which he suggests was “clearly political.” He dismissively cites claims about social media’s “threat to democracy” that he once embraced when he banned the sitting president for claiming he’d won an election he didn’t. It’s an effort to disown past decisions and to blame them on motivated critics and outsiders who pressured the company, didn’t really understand or care about Meta’s platforms or users, and led them astray. Now, facing diametric pressures that are also obviously political and relentlessly applied to strategic ends, Meta is saying with surprising bluntness: Now we’ll do this for your team, which, by the way, I’ve always been sympathetic to anyway.

Parts of the right are obviously pleased with how this is going, but that doesn’t mean they trust him, nor that they should. While Zuckerberg clearly shares some of their annoyance at liberal critiques of Meta, the overlap is largely incidental: He’s a billionaire CEO, so of course the most salient and disruptive criticism and regulatory threats of any moment are annoying and seem unfair to him, and he’s glad when those threats are diminished. That both Zuckerberg and his conservative antagonists don’t like the New York Times is a weaker basis for an alliance than Zuckerberg, however “based” he might be, seems to believe.

Zuckerberg’s attempts to express a deeper change of heart are also undermined by his typically analytic and alien description of what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. He references an exogenous “cultural shift” that has left Meta’s policies “out of touch” with “the mainstream discourse,” a set of arm’s-length justifications that all but anticipate a 2028 Zuck post about how dishonest outside influences had once again led poor Meta astray.