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• Mark Zuckerberg explained why Meta is replacing fact-checkers on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
• He said the change aims to address ideological censorship concerns and enhance user voice.
• Critics argue the move is a setback for accuracy.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained his rationale for changing the company's content moderation policies during Friday's episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Earlier, on Tuesday, Zuckerberg posted a video message to Meta's blog announcing that he would replace fact-checkers with community notes, a system similar to what Elon Musk uses on X.

The announcement was criticized by dozens of third-party fact-checking groups, which signed an open letter to Zuckerberg denouncing the changes as a "step backward" for accuracy.

Zuckerberg told Rogan his reason for the changes was "censorship."

"You only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice," he said. "It goes back to our original mission, it's just give people the power to share and make people more open and connected."

Zuckerberg said that over the past 10 years, there's been a greater push for "idealogical-based censorship" on the platform, fueled especially by the 2016 election, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic. "We just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to start censoring content on ideological grounds," he said.

Zuckerberg initially gave into the pressure, believing it stemmed from genuine concerns about misinformation. After the 2016 election, he implemented a system of third-party fact-checkers tasked with correcting statements like "the earth is flat." However, the system quickly veered into gray areas, leading to accusations that the company's moderators were biased.

Pressure on Meta's content moderation policies continued, reaching a fever pitch during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Biden administration rolled out its vaccine program. "While they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it," Zuckerberg said. "They pushed us super hard to take down things that were, honestly, were true."

That means he has been considering changing Meta's content moderation policies for a while now.

"I think that this is going to be pretty durable because, at this point, we've just been pressure tested on this stuff for the last 8 to 10 years with like these huge institutions just pressuring us," he said. "I feel like this is kind of the right place to be going forward."

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Special counsel Jack Smith resigned just days before President-elect Trump is set to take over the presidency, multiple outlets reported Saturday.

Why it matters: Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in Nov. 2022, spearheaded two federal criminal cases against Trump, but the future of both cases was imperiled by Trump's election victory.

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• Trump is the first convicted felon to win the presidency, but he avoided any consequences in his New York hush money case.
• With Trump's victory, Smith's cases — over the 2020 election and classified documents — were imperiled and weeks after the election, he requested the former to be dropped and his appeal in the latter to be dismissed.
• The two cases had already been undercut by the Supreme Court's immunity ruling.
• However, a federal appeals court said this week that Smith's final report on his investigations into Trump can be released despite the president-elect's strenuous objections.
• The New York Times first reported on Nov. 13, that Smith planned to resign once the report was complete.

State of play: Since Trump's re-election, Smith was in discussions with Justice Department officials about how to wind down his two federal prosecutions of Trump.

• The Justice Department has a longstanding policy that a sitting president can't be prosecuted.
• Trump also vowed on the campaign trail to fire Smith "within two seconds" of returning to office.

Zoom out: The Justice Department has faced criticism from some Democrats that it moved too slowly in its investigations of Trump.

• In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Smith dug in on the Jan. 6 case, unsealing a new indictment in light of the Supreme Court's immunity ruling and unveiling new evidence.

Go deeper: Jack Smith moving to wind down prosecutions against Trump

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Seattle animal shelters welcome 60 pets from California wildfire zones as Los Angeles-area rescues struggle with evacuation surge.

As devastating wildfires raged across Los Angeles County this week, firefighters battling the blazes encountered fire hydrants that had no water.

Why it matters: The dry fire hydrants sparked political outrage and illustrated just how unprepared municipal water systems are to combat the sorts of large-scale urban wildfires that have become more frequent with climate change.

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• Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Friday ordered an independent investigation into the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), the nation's largest municipal utility, over hydrants and water supply issues. DWP provides water for more than four million L.A. residents and serves Pacific Palisades, a wealthy area of Los Angeles where much of the destruction took place.
• "While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish wildfires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors," Newsom said. "We need answers to how that happened."
• President-elect Trump has suggested Newsom was to blame for the dry hydrants — claiming without evidence that he blocked water supply to the south of the state with the state's fish conservation efforts. The governor and other experts have sharply rejected the claims.
• "We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design," Marty Adams, a former DWP general manager and engineer, told The New York Times.

The big picture: Fire hydrants running out of water isn't unheard of during severe wildfires, according to Kearns, as similar instances were reported during wildfires in Maui, Colorado and Oregon.

• "It's something that we have definitely started to see as, essentially, these wildland fires move into urban areas and become urban conflagrations," Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire expert with the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, told Axios.
• "Our urban water supply is meant to deal more with things like a single house being on fire," she added.

Why did the fire hydrants run dry?

Firefighters battling the Palisades Fire earlier this week encountered swaths of fire hydrants with no water after the three water tanks supplying the Pacific Palisades ran dry by 3 a.m. Wednesday, Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a press briefing later that day.

• The area's water system had been pushed "to the extreme," she said. "Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure."
• The problem persisted for hours while wildfires ravaged the area, the New York Times reported.

Political finger-pointing as a result

Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk skewered California Democrats, and in Trump's case Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), over the wildfires.

• Musk wrote on X Wednesday: "These fires are easily avoidable, but nonsense regulations in California prevent action being taken, so year after year homes burn down and more people die."
• Trump claimed on Truth Social Wednesday that Newsom, a longtime foe, had "refused to sign" a water restoration declaration "that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California" including areas impacted by wildfires.

Newsom in an X post Wednesday called Trump's claim "that a water restoration declaration" exists "pure fiction."

• He said — though not mentioning Trump — during a briefing Friday with President Biden that there have been "hurricane force winds of mis and disinformation, lies."
• "And it breaks my heart as people are suffering and struggling that we're up against those hurricane forces as well," the governor added.
• Newsom also in a letter to Trump Friday invited him to visit and see the damage in L.A.

Would more water have helped?

Even if the water hydrants hadn't run dry, it wouldn't have changed the fact that urban water systems aren't designed to combat multiple, expansive and fast-moving wildfires all at once.

• While every bit of water helps, using fire hydrants and water hoses isn't an effective method of battling "multiple onslaughts of fire under high wind conditions,' she said.
• "Is it going to save a whole neighborhood under those kinds of ... high wind conditions? Probably not.

Fighting wildland fires in urban areas also limits the methods that can be used, like aerial drops, which could damage structures below, she noted.

• High winds can also ground planes, which was the case when a civilian drone hit a Super Scooper aircraft used in the Palisades Fire on Thursday, per an X post from Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Erik Scott.
• That fire was only 11% contained as of Saturday morning.

What we're watching: Kearns said cities need, among other things, high-volume pipes and more backup power to pump waters to higher elevations.

• "Now we face the question of whether and how there would be enough funding, for example, to actually develop urban water systems that were equipped to deal with these kinds of wildfires," she said.

More from Axios:

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