Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters.

Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting conservative opinions.

The recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement, justifying relaxed new content moderation rules on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said, repeating a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact checking.

Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, with billions of users on its platforms worldwide, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways.

Tuesday morning’s announcements seemed like they were addressed directly to Trump, especially since Meta first gave the news exclusively to “Fox & Friends,” one of the president-elect’s favorite TV shows.

The company’s newly promoted policy chief Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sat with the Fox co-hosts and fully agreed with the show’s “censorship” versus “freedom” framing.

Kaplan’s appearance was the latest sign of Meta recalibrating in advance of Trump’s second term in office.

Trump and some key allies have been harshly critical of Zuckerberg and Facebook in the past. Trump once accused Zuckerberg of election interference and threatened to send him to prison for “the rest of his life.”

Meta also has lots of business before the US government. The Federal Trade Commission has an antitrust case against the company that is supposed to go to trial in April.

On CNBC Tuesday morning, outgoing FTC chair Lina Khan said Meta might “want a sweetheart deal” from the Trump administration, “and I hope future enforcers wouldn’t give them that.”

Meta is clearly trying to appeal to the incoming administration.

Zuckerberg, touching on two popular right-wing themes, said the company will “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

The company will also scrap its partnerships with third-party fact-checking groups and move toward an X-style “community notes” system instead. Zuckerberg asserted that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

In general, Meta will be much more laissez-faire about the content on Facebook and other platforms.

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Kaplan wrote in a blog post.

Meta will relax the rules and “tune our systems to require a much higher degree of confidence before a piece of content is taken down,” Kaplan added.

Conservatives immediately cheered Meta’s changes while others, including misinformation experts, warned Meta’s platforms would become even more of a cesspool. False and hateful content will likely become even more commonplace on the social networks.

The changes will also likely lead to layoffs at some news outlets. As journalist Jane Lytvynenko noted on Bluesky, Facebook and Google are “chief funders of fact-checking outlets” around the world, and “there are newsrooms around the world for whom that funding means survival.”

“For those using the platforms, it means they are again on their own to discern what’s genuine information and what’s not,” Lytvynenko added.

Some commentators predicted that Zuckerberg’s announcements would hasten the adoption of alternative social networks like Bluesky. Others suggested that the average user might not notice the changes.

Zuckerberg said at the end of his video that Meta is also “bringing back civic content,” meaning the company will tweak its algorithms so that users can see more posts about elections, politics and social issues.

“For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” he said. “But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.” Political posts tend to cause strife, but Meta will work “to keep the communities friendly and positive,” he added.

Kaplan said the company will take a more “personalized approach” so that users who want more political content can see it in their feeds. It’s a change that underscores just how much power Meta has accumulated.