In a shift akin to what Elon Musk has done with the platform we still call Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will soon be more of a free-for-all when it comes to homophobia, transphobia, and misinformation, with "community notes" inserted when facts are questioned.The depressing rightward shift of Silicon Valley continues this week as formerly liberal-minded Mark Zuckerberg again capitulates to Trumpworld. Facebook, the platform that de-platformed President-elect Trump due to his inciting a riot at the Capital four years ago, is taking a step back from strict content rules as Trump heads back into power."I gave a speech five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression," Zuckerberg says in a video address, looking lately like a divorced dad who moved to Maui and let his hair grow out. He adds that "a lot has changed" in the last couple of years, with "governments and legacy media pushing to censor more and more," and "a lot of this is clearly political." And Zuck says that Meta's "complex systems" have a tendency to make mistakes when it comes to content moderation, and "we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes, and too much censorship."In a corporate blog post, Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan announced Tuesday that the company is ending its eight-year-old third-party fact-checking program, which came into being around Trump's first election, shifting to a user-based Community Notes approach."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 writes. "We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias."So, for instance, when the anti-vaxxers start going hog-wild about whatever batshit decisions RFK Jr. starts to make — if he actually gets confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services — Facebook will just let other, saner users post a Community Note that you have to click through to read, rather than remove such a post because it's actually dangerous to public health.Kaplan goes on to say that Meta will become less strict in its content moderation policies overall, and will stop policing, say, grossly transphobic content as hate speech."We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement," Kaplan says, basically sounding like Elon Musk. "We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented."Facebook is also going to be "phasing back" an algorithmic policy, started in 2021 and much touted by Zuckerberg at the time, to downplay and demote political content. Kaplan says they'll be opting for "a more personalized approach so that people who want to see more political content in their feeds can."Kaplan says they will be focusing on "illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams," and they will stop worrying so much about hate speech that can become actually dangerous to people of color and LGBTQ people — especially LGBTQ youth.As the New York Times notes, Meta's new policy explicitly allows users to share "allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality." Such statements used to be considered content violations.This feels like just another strategic pivot, in a long line of such pivots, that Meta is making as the political winds shift — and it's one that could blow back on them very, very easily, and start to impact the bottom line of a company whose ad revenue far eclipses that of Xitter. It will likely also give everyone who isn't your racist uncle more reason to abandon Facebook if they haven't already, and we'll have to wait and see how this shift in policy hurts or benefits Instagram and Threads.It's only been a year and a half since Meta launched Threads, billing it as a "more sanely run" version of Twitter, by which they meant "not a free-for-all of hate speech and misinformation," which many saw Twitter becoming under Musk. And seriously, how do they avoid the pitfalls of having utter lunacy and hate-filled content running next to highly lucrative ad content?Tech watchdog and anti-hate-speech groups have come out swinging following Meta's announcement, with Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, asserting that this is Zuckerberg "saying yes to more lies, yes to more harassment, yes to more hate." Benavidez adds that this is an effort by Meta to "Ditch the technology company’s responsibility to protect the health and safety of its users, and align the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability."Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, said that this was "a gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world," and would usher in a new era of more conspiracy theories and general insanity around the world.As the Times notes, while a who's-who of hateful Republicans like Senator Rand Paul and Rep. Jim Jordan praised Meta's announcement, one Republican critic of social media companies, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, took to Xitter to say this was just "a ploy to avoid being regulated," which, yah.Previously: What's Up With Mark Zuckerberg Talking to Trump on the Phone Twice This Summer?Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images