Social media has always acted as something of a funhouse mirror to society as a whole. The algorithms and amplifications of an always-online existence have helped accentuate the worst parts of our lives, while tucking in and hiding the best. It’s part of why we’re so polarised today, with two tribes shouting past one another on social media into a gaping chasm of hopelessness.

Which is what makes a declaration by one titan of big tech this week so worrying. Abandon hope all ye who enter: less than two weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House for a second crack at the US presidency, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads, has made major changes to content moderation, and in doing so appears to align itself with the views of the incoming president.

In a bizarre video message posted to his personal Facebook page on Tuesday, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the platform is getting rid of its third-party factcheckers, starting in the US. In their place? Mob rule.

Zuckerberg has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community notes format for policing what is and isn’t acceptable speech on its platforms. Starting in the US, the company will be dramatically shifting the Overton window towards whoever can shout the loudest.

The Meta CEO all but admitted that the move was politically motivated. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” he said, confessing that “restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with mainstream discourse”. He admitted to past “censorship mistakes” – here, probably meaning the past four years of tamping down political speech while a Democratic president was in office – and said he would “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more”.

The most dog-whistle comment was a throwaway remark that Meta would be moving what remained of its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of liberal California and its US content moderation would now be based in staunchly Republican Texas. All that was missing from the video was Zuckerberg wearing a Maga hat and toting a shotgun.

To be clear: all businesspeople make shrewd moves to accommodate the political weather. And there are few more violent storms than Hurricane Trump approaching the US. But few people’s decisions matter more than Mark Zuckerberg’s.

The Meta CEO has found himself, in the past 21 years, a central part of our society. Initially, he oversaw a website that was used by college students. Now it’s used by billions of us from all walks of life. What in the early 2000s was a quaint online pursuit for fun has become the “de facto public town square”, to borrow Elon Musk’s words. Where Meta goes, the world – online and offline – follows. And Meta has just decided to take a drastic, dramatic handbrake turn to the right.

Don’t believe me. Believe the watchdogs. “Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation,” said the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent, self-appointed arbiter of Meta’s moves, in a statement.

Why they say that is because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from being so polarised over the past decade or more by social media, it’s that those who are the angriest win arguments. Outrage and lies can spread on social media, and have only been kept partly in check by platforms’ ability to intervene when things get out of hand. (Remember just four years ago, Meta suspended Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram for two years for inciting the violence that racked the Capitol on 6 January 2021.)

Social networks have always struggled to moderate speech on their platforms. The one thing they’re certain of doing, whichever way they’ve come down on an argument, is annoying 50% of the population. Those platforms haven’t helped themselves with chronic underinvestment in favour of growing their business at all costs. The platforms have long said effective moderation is an unsolvable issue of scale, but it’s a problem they created with an untrammelled pursuit of scale at all costs.

Certainly, policing online discourse is difficult, and certainly, content moderation at the level companies such as Meta have been trying to operate has not worked. But forswearing it entirely in favour of community notes is not the answer. Suggesting that it is a rational, evidence-based decision hides the reality: this is a politically expedient move for a man who this week saw the departure of a self-described “radical” centrist, Nick Clegg, as his global policy chief in favour of a Republican-leaning one. And who also appointed Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO and close Trump ally, to Meta’s board.

In many ways, you can’t blame Zuckerberg for bending the knee to Donald Trump. The problem is his decision has huge ramifications.

This is an extinction-level event for the idea of objective truth on social media – an organism that was already on life support, but was clinging on in part because Meta was willing to fund independent factchecking organisations in order to try to maintain some element of truthfulness, free from political bias. Night is day. Up is down. Meta is X. Mark Zuckerberg is Elon Musk. Buckle in for a turbulent, vitriolic and fact-free four years online.

• Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

• This article was amended on 8 January 2025. A previous version said Meta was removing its content moderation teams. In fact, Meta is cutting back only on its third-party factcheckers.