• The reaction among creators to Meta's content-moderation changes has largely fallen along political lines.
• Some influencers worry the changes could cause harm to the LGBTQ+ community.
• Others questioned Meta's decision to feature more political content.

Getting "Zucked" — a term for having your account suspended or content removed due to community violations — is a staple in the creator lexicon.

Despite that, creators who spoke with Business Insider had mixed reactions to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to reduce content moderation in the name of free speech.

On Tuesday, Meta unveiled new policies that included winding down fact-checking, loosening content moderation, and introducing X-style "Community Notes."

The creator community largely reacted along political lines, with some left-leaning influencers expressing disappointment.

"This is really about just pandering to the Trump administration in a way that feels extremely obvious," LGBTQ+ advocate and "Gay News" host Josh Helfgott told BI.

Left-leaning filmmaker Michael McWhorter also said he felt the changes were catering to Trump and his MAGA base.

"You're not trying to balance things out," McWhorter said of Meta. "We are shifting to the other side of things."

Elsewhere, some right-leaning creators cheered the changes.

Christopher Townsend, an Air Force vet and conservative rapper with over 300,000 Instagram followers, told BI he thought the policy overhaul was "a great step toward the decentralization of information and the end to the control legacy media has had on the prevailing narrative."

Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted a video on Wednesday outlining how the new policies would impact creators. He said the company would correct its "over-enforcement" of content moderation and begin recommending political content again.

"If you're a creator who likes to post about political content, this should mean that you feel comfortable doing so on any of our platforms," Mosseri said. "We will now show political recommendations."

Meta didn't respond to a request for comment.

Some are wary of Community Notes

As part of the policy overhaul, Meta is getting rid of fact-checkers in favor of Community Notes in the style of Elon Musk's X. Users will be able to volunteer to contribute to Community Notes, which will appear on content when people with a range of different perspectives agree a correction is in order.

"Like X, it gives the user community more authority over the platform instead of biased third-party administrators," Townsend said.

McWhorter said that while Community Notes were a "great equalizer," he felt they were not an adequate replacement for fact-checking. He said he wished Meta would rely on a combination of both systems.

A former Instagram staffer told BI that they felt placing the responsibility to moderate content on users and creators "on a platform with massive global reach and historical harmful content issues" was a step in the wrong direction. They asked for anonymity to protect business relationships; their identity is known to BI.

Concerns about anti-LGBTQ+ discourse

Helfgott expressed concern about Meta's plan to decrease moderation around certain political topics. The company's blog post specifically noted immigration and gender identity as areas of debate where it plans to decrease restrictions.

Helfgott said that while Meta's plans were described in the language of "political discourse," he felt the changes could lead to bullying of the LGBTQ+ community.

Alongside Tuesday's announcement, Meta updated its Hateful Conduct policy.

"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation," the company wrote, "given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird.'"

"This is the most anti-LGBTQ announcement that a social-media platform has made in recent memory," Helfgott said.

While McWhorter told BI he felt his content had been Zucked — or unfairly suppressed — in the past, he said he'd prefer a stricter moderating system even if it had "flaws."

"I'd rather that I take the hit for a joke that it didn't understand than that stuff being allowed to be spread all over the platform," he said, referring to potentially harmful posts.

Meta's increased political emphasis marks an about-face

Some creators were flummoxed by Meta's about-face on the amount of political content it plans to recommend. The company had previously cut back significantly on promoting political content in feeds in recent years.

Malynda Hale, a creator and activist with 65,000 followers, said this change could benefit political creators but questioned the company's motives.

"I think the fact that Meta is going to be serving up more political content is actually positive for creators like myself, but I don't think it's with the intention to keep the community informed," she told BI.

She said she felt Meta wanted to boost engagement even at the cost of division and disagreement.

Despite some misgivings, the creators who spoke with BI said they weren't going anywhere.

"I'll work with the system as it's presented to me, and I'll find my way to work around it," McWhorter said. "I constantly have to do that on all different platforms."

Helfgott said he felt "handcuffed" by Meta because if he stopped posting on Instagram, he would lose out on millions of people seeing his content each month.

"Meta knows this," he said. "They know that creators may not like this, but we need the reach, and we will keep posting there."

• Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta.
• Its new content-moderation policy is a huge change — and it could be an improvement.
• Mark Zuckerberg's "apology tour" from the past few years seems to be officially over.

Mark Zuckerberg's changes to Meta's content-moderation policies are potentially huge.

To fully understand their gravity, it's useful to look at how Meta got here. And to consider what these changes might actually mean for users: Are they a bow to an incoming Trump administration? Or an improvement to a system that's gotten Zuckerberg and Co. lots of heat before? Or a little of both?

Content moderation has always been a pit of despair for Meta. In its blog post announcing the changes on Tuesday, Meta's new head of policy, Joel Kaplan, talked about wanting to get back to Facebook's roots in "free speech." Still, those roots contain a series of moderation fires, headaches, and constant adjustments to the platform's policies.

Starting in 2016, moderation troubles just kept coming like a bad "We Didn't Start the Fire" cover. Consider this roundup:

• Fake news.
• Macedonian teens.
• Russian troll farms.
• Hillary Clinton's team blaming Facebook for her loss.
• Zuckerberg responding to that idea by calling it "pretty crazy."
• Cambridge Analytica.
• Alleged manipulation by President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
• WhatsApp inciting lynchings in India.
• Facebook Groups spouting health misinformation involving kids drinking bleach or DIY skin-cancer treatments.
• The Rohingya Muslim genocide.
• COVID-19 misinformation.
• The Hunter Biden laptop story.
• "Stop the Steal" Facebook groups used to organize January 6, 2021.
• The Facebook Files and whistleblower leaks about Instagram and teen mental health.

Whatever your political alignment, it seems like Meta has been trapped in a vicious cycle of making a policy — or lacking a policy — then reversing itself to try to clean up a mess.

As Charlie Warzel pointed out in The Atlantic, Zuckerberg has sometimes blamed external forces when he's faced with situations like some of the ones above.

That's maybe until now. As Zuckerberg posted on Threads on Wednesday, "Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better."

Maybe the big changes were already brewing this past September when Zuckerberg appeared at a live event and said, "One of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong, or were responsible for, that I don't actually think we were."

In other words, as of this week, the apology tour seems to have ended.

What will Meta's changes mean for you and me, the users?

What will the changes mean? Who knows! I can make a few predictions:

The "community note" system might work pretty well — or at least not worse than the current human- and AI-led fact-checking system.

There might be more content in your feeds that you don't like — political speech that you find abhorrent, for example.

It's also possible that while certain content might exist on the platform, you won't actually come across it because it will have been downgraded. "Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach" has been X's mantra (though considering the flow of truly vile content that has proliferated in my feed there in the past year or so, I don't think that's been particularly effective).

One other piece of the announcement is that Meta will focus its AI-powered filtering efforts on the highest-risk content (terrorism, drugs, and child endangerment). For lesser violations, the company said, it will rely more on user reports. Meta hasn't given details on how exactly this will work, but I imagine it could have a negative effect on common issues like bullying and harassment.

A large but less glamorous part of content moderation is removing "ur ugly" comments on Instagram — and that's the kind of stuff that will rely on user reporting.

It's also quite possible that bad actors will take advantage of the opening. Facebook is nothing if not a place to buy used furniture while various new waves of pillagers attempt to test and game the algorithms for profit or menace — just consider the current wave of AI slop, some of which appears at least in part to be a profitable scam operation run from outside the US.

What do the changes mean for Meta?

If these changes had been rolled out slowly, one at a time, they might have seemed like reasonable measures just on their face. Community notes? Sure. Loosening rules on certain hot political topics? Well, not everyone will like it, but Meta can claim some logic there. Decreasing reliance on automatic filters and admitting that too many non-violations have been swept up in AI dragnets? People would celebrate that.

No one thought Meta's moderation before the announced changes was perfect. There were lots of complaints (correctly) about how it banned too much stuff by mistake — which this new policy is aiming to fix.

And switching from third-party fact-checkers to a community-notes system isn't necessarily bad. The fact-checking system wasn't perfect, and community notes on X, the system Meta is modeling its own after, can be quite useful. Even acknowledging that, yes, X has sometimes become a cesspit for bad content, the root cause isn't the community notes.

Still, it's impossible to weigh the merits of each aspect of the new policy and have blinders on when it comes to the 800-pound political gorilla in the room.

There's one pretty obvious way of looking at Meta's announcement of sweeping changes to its moderation policy: It's a move to cater to an incoming Trump administration. It's a sign that Zuckerberg has shifted to the right, as he drapes himself in some of the cultural signifiers of the bro-y Zynternet (gold chain, $900,000 watch, longer hair, new style, front row at an MMA match).

Together, every piece of this loudly signals that Zuckerberg either A., genuinely believed he'd been forced to cave on moderation issues in the past, or B., knows that making these changes will please Trump. I don't really think the distinction between A and B matters too much anyway. (Meta declined to comment.)

This probably isn't the last of the changes

I try to avoid conflating "Meta" with "Mark Zuckerberg" too much. It's a big company! There are many smart people who care deeply about the lofty goals of social networking who create policy and carry out the daily work of trust and safety.

Part of me wonders how much Zuckerberg wishes this boring and ugly part of the job would fade away — there are so many more shiny new things to work on, like AI or mixed-reality smart glasses. Reworking the same decade-old policies so that people can insult each other 10% more is probably less fun than MMA fighting or talking to AI researchers.

Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta. Scaling it back, allowing more speech on controversial topics, and outsourcing fact-checking to the community seems like a short-term fix for having to deal with this unpleasant and thankless job. I can't help but imagine that another overhaul will come due sometime in the next four years.

• Meta announced Tuesday it's doing away with third-party fact-checking in favor of community notes.
• Several lawmakers told BI the move is an indication Mark Zuckerberg is catering to Trump.
• Some business leaders praised Meta for the change while others expressed concern.

Meta is carrying out the biggest overhaul to its content moderation system in years.

The company announced on Tuesday that it's replacing third-party fact-checking program with user-generated community notes, like those on Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter.

In another page from Musk's playbook, Meta said it's moving some teams — specifically its trust and safety teams, responsible for writing the company's content policies and reviewing content — out of California into Texas and other locations in the US.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the decision was about getting "back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms."

Democrats: Zuckerberg's sucking up to Trump

Democratic lawmakers told BI at the US Capitol on Tuesday that they saw the move as a sign that Zuckerberg is trying to appease President-elect Donald Trump ahead of his return to the Oval Office.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said Zuckerberg was "kissing Trump's ass" in making the change.

"I think that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to follow in Elon's footsteps, which means that actually, they're going to use this guise of free speech to actually suppress critics of Trump and critics of themselves," Ocasio-Cortez said. "That's why they're moving to this system. It's a model for their own self-aggrandizement."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told BI that Big Tech CEOs "want a government that works for them, and they're making clear that sucking up to Donald Trump is one of the ways they think they'll get that."

Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida said the change appeared to be symptomatic of authoritarianism.

"It's not just about the legislation they pass, or what they push, but it creates this environment of fear and self-censorship, and a place where companies will begin to do the things he wants them to do without him forcing them to do it," he said, referring to Trump.

"They're surrendering essentially to implied threats by the government, which is very dangerous," Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York said.

Trump himself told reporters Tuesday that he believed Zuckerberg's changes at Meta were "probably" in response to previous threats Trump has made to the Meta chief executive, including to jail him.

Republicans: A good sign, but we'll see

Republicans offered more mixed reactions to Zuckerberg's decision, with some expressing skepticism while others saw it as a win. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told reporters at the Capitol that what the Meta CEO said "sounds good" but that the "proof will be in the pudding."

He also said he saw Zuckerberg's move as the product of both political positioning and a sincere evolution in his thinking.

"I've had multiple conversations with Mark on this topic," Cruz said, "and I will say, he had previously expressed an interest in protecting free speech."

Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, meanwhile, called the decision a "ploy to avoid being regulated." For several years, she's been pushing a bill to increase social media protections for kids.

"Can any of us assume Zuckerberg won't return to his old tricks?" wrote Sen. Mike Lee of Utah on X.

Republican Rep. Randy Weber of Texas, meanwhile, wrote on X that it was "a great day for freedom of speech."

"It seems like Meta is finally taking a page from Elon Musk's playbook & letting Americans make decisions for themselves. It's about time Meta owned up to censoring Americans," he added.

Tech and business leaders react

In the tech and business world, some of Zuck's peers congratulated him and Meta on the move.

Musk said in separate tweets that the decision was "cool" and "awesome."

X CEO Linda Yaccarino called it "a smart move by Zuck."

"Fact-checking and moderation doesn't belong in the hands of a few select gatekeepers who can easily inject their bias into decisions. It's a democratic process that belongs in the hands of many," she wrote.

David Marcus, the former Meta exec in charge of the company's Libra cryptocurrency project, said the change marked a "massive step in the right direction towards free expression for Meta."

Other tech and business figures were more skeptical of the decision.

Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter's trust and safety department, said, "Genuinely baffled by the unempirical assertion that Community Notes 'works.' Does it? How do Meta know? The best available research is pretty mixed on this point. And as they go all-in on an unproven concept, will Meta commit to publicly releasing data so people can actually study this?"

And in response to a message from Zuckerberg saying Meta will work with Trump to "push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more," Mark Cuban wrote on Bluesky: "Translation: Americans are going to see Tariffs on products from countries you believe censor Meta services as a means of pressuring them into removing any restrictions that impact your profitability in those countries. Also: You'll have carte blanche to take posts that no longer have restrictions, making them a more explicit representation, and train your AI Models."

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with community notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
• Mark Zuckerberg said Meta would roll out the notes, similar to X's, over the next few months.
• He added that Meta would bring back more political content to users' timelines.

Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with a community-notes model on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced Tuesday that the company also planned to bring more political content back to the users' timelines and give them the option to customize how much of it they see.

The social media company is set to implement the sweeping content-moderation changes over the next few months.

"First, we are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US," Zuckerberg said in a video message on Meta's blog.

Meta's recently appointed chief global-affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said in the blog: "We've seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see."

Kaplan said the approach was "less prone to bias."

The company will also "simplify" its content policies, Kaplan said, and "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse."

Meta has faced scrutiny in the past for its approach to content moderation. In August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO said in his letter that the Biden administration repeatedly pressured the company in 2021 to remove COVID-19-related content and "expressed a lot of frustration" when the company did not agree.

X, called Twitter at the time, launched community notes in 2021, but the feature started appearing on more posts in 2023. Users can sign up to add context to posts that might contain misinformation or misleading content. Other users can rate how helpful they find the note.

Similar to X, Meta will let users contribute to the writing and rating of community notes, Kaplan said.

He added that Meta would move its trust and safety teams, which help moderate content, from California to Texas and other locations in the US.

The relocation of the trust and safety teams follows a move by X, which has its content-moderation headquarters in Austin. Last year, Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations at the time, told Bloomberg that the platform was aiming to hire 100 full-time workers for the team.

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.