Is Mark Zuckerberg becoming a mini-Elon Musk?

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, would abandon its traditional approach to fact-checking. Meta will instead rely on X-style community notes, where ordinary users can add comments to individual posts to make corrections or clarifications in the future.

The decision was part of a broader solution to Meta’s content moderation problems, Zuckerberg said. in the video posted on his personal Facebook page. “It’s time to return to our roots regarding freedom of expression,” Zuckerberg said, saying the Meta’s current rules for discussing immigration and gender are “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

The decision came as a shock to many, as Meta has long been considered one of the best among relatively bad tech companies when it comes to content moderation efforts, thanks in large part to 40,000 people moderators (although these efforts brought mixed results).

It’s also the latest sign that Zuckerberg is trying to cozy up to new President Donald Trump and in that regard is becoming more like Trump’s current right-hand man in tech: Elon Musk.

Zuckerberg said in a video Tuesday that he would work with Trump, whose inauguration fund he contributed to. donated $1 million“to fight back against foreign governments targeting American companies for increased censorship.” The content moderation announcement came days after he replaced his centrist foreign affairs chief Nick Clegg with Republican Joel Kaplan and appointed Trump aide Dana White to Meta’s board of directors.

“Zuckerberg is clearly concerned that his position as the most important and influential person on social media has weakened in recent years,” says Stephen Buckley, an American researcher of politics and social media at City, University of London. “Elon Musk has clearly taken on this mantle since his relationship with Trump blossomed late last year.”

Given Musk’s close relationship with Trump, it seems reasonable for Zuckerberg to try to become friends with the president-elect. This could help insulate Meta from any decisions that could negatively impact the company during Trump’s second term – say, by imposing tough antitrust measures or filing complaints about what Meta decides to prioritize on its large platforms. “It’s difficult to determine whether Zuckerberg truly supports Trump and his technology policies, or whether this is a purely cynical move on his part to get closer to power and have some influence on the direction of the future administration’s policies,” Buckley says.