Mark Zuckerberg has met with Donald Trump for a second time since the election as the Facebook owner faces down critics of his so-called MAGA makeover.
The tech titan was spotted getting on to his private jet in Palm Beach, Florida, which was parked next to Trump’s after the pair met at Mar-a-Lago.
The co-chair of Meta’s oversight board suggested Zuckerberg was ‘caving in to Trump’ by axing Facebook fact-checking and admitted he was blindsided by the stunning U-turn.
Zuckerberg, whose Meta group owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, is in the midst of an abrupt policy shift that took users and staff by surprise.
He announced he would end the fact-checking program, which multiple studies found reduced misinformation on Meta social media sites.
The billionaire also moved to allow for LGBT people to be called mentally ill, promoted his most Trump-favoring executive, and put UFC boss Dana White on the board.
Michael McConnell, co-chair of the Meta Oversight Board, was mostly guarded when asked about the changes, but admitted the optics were ‘bad’.
‘I do think that there’s bad optics here, that it looks like and may be even the reality – I don’t know,’ he told NPR.
‘But it certainly looks like this is buckling to political pressure. I would have liked to have seen these reforms laid out, you know… in less contentious and partisan times so that they would be considered on the merits.
‘Rather than looking like this is – you know, Donald Trump is president, and now they’re caving.’
The Meta Oversight Board is made up of experts in law, human rights, and journalism from around the world that reviews content moderation policies and decisions.
McConnell admitted ‘there’s pretty overwhelming evidence that the fact-checkers corrected much more content from the right side of the spectrum than the left side of the spectrum’ but said it wasn’t clear if that was because more lies came from the right.
He said the board was blindsided by Zuckerberg’s decision and was not consulted before it was announced.
‘We did not know that they were going to be revising that standard,’ he said of the fact-checking program.
By contrast, Zuckerberg told the president-elect’s team ahead of time, according to the New York Times.
Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the election, donated $1 million to his inauguration and sat down with him a second time on Friday.
He strode from his car to his Gulfstream G650 jet at Palm Beach International Airport, wearing a navy suit and appropriately red tie.
His jet was notably smaller than the modified Boeing 757 ‘Trump Force One’ it was parked next to on the tarmac.
During a five-minute video explaining the new policies, Zuckerberg claimed his fact-checking ‘reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship’.
‘Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,’ he said.
Joel Kaplan, a Trump ally whom Zuckerberg promoted to chief global affairs officer after the election, also claimed on Fox News that there was ‘too much political bias’ in Meta’s fact-checking program.
These claims stood at odds with independent studies, which determined that the program helped to reduce misinformation.
Fewer people believed falsehoods than before it was implemented, they found.
Zuckerberg admitted misinformation would rise, but insisted it was more important to allow mostly unfettered free expression.
‘The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,’ he said.
Another policy shift that many found alarming was the removal of protections against the abuse of LGBT people.
Meta users will be able to share ‘allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality’.
Zuckerberg said this was part of a push to ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’.