In a cringe-inducing attempt to curry favor with president-elect Donald Trump, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced sweeping changes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads that will almost certainly allow hate speech, misinformation, and other deleterious drek to proliferate on the platform even more than it already does.

"It's time to get back to our roots around free expression," the 40-year-old tech founder said in a new video posted to Facebook. Apparently, that means replacing Meta's controversial third-party fact-checkers with user-submitted "community notes," lifting restrictions on "controversial topics," and moving its content review team from liberal California to deep-red Texas.

Amid it all, a sidelong reference the millennial technocrat made to Trump suggests he's gearing up for the president-elect's second inauguration in just a few weeks.

"After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy," the CEO said. "We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth."

During his five-minute-long video address, Zuckerberg admitted that the new community note scheme was "similar to X," formerly Twitter. He failed to mention, however, that its newish owner Elon Musk also announced plans to relocate X and SpaceX from the Golden State to Texas last year amid that billionaire's attempt to escape regulations and what he framed as excessive political correctness.

Along with those moves, the chief meta-mate also announced that the tech conglomerate plans to "get rid of a bunch of restrictions" on topics such as immigration and gender because, as he put it, such regulations are "just out of touch with mainstream discourse."

"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far," Zuckerberg said. "So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms."

Exactly what allowing users to "share their beliefs" means about topics like gender identity and immigration means seems painfully clear: in an environment where some groups are fighting for self-determination and safety and others are often literally braying for blood, the company is loosening its existing standards on what sorts of hateful things you can say on its platform.

To round the entire thing off, the Harvard dropout also announced that Meta will be "bringing back civic content," which is his robotic way of saying that the company will soon start promoting political posts.

"For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts," Zuckerberg 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. So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, while working to keep the communities friendly and positive."

That last bit, if you didn't catch it, is almost laughably similar to recent comments from Musk begging people to be nicer and more positive on X — even while the free speech absolutist himself tweets ableist slurs against people who criticize him.

Taken together, the shifts seem almost certain to open the floodgates for hate speech in the name of free speech.

"We're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms," Zuckerberg threatened. Given that he just appointed Dana White, UFC head and longtime Trump friend, to Meta's board, it seems best to take him at his word.

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