Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared in a video Tuesday that the company would prioritize free speech, no longer suppress political content, and loosen the standards for censoring content moving forward. 

For Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, the executive director and founder of the nonprofit organization Cyberwell, which is focused on fighting against online antisemitism, this move by Meta would allow hate speech to flourish.

“This change means one thing, very in line with the trend of both the quantity and quality of content that we have seen on X since Musk acquired Twitter – more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos and less effective responses from the platforms,” Montemayor said in a statement. 

Zuckerberg shared how he felt pressure from both the U.S. government and legacy media to suppress political speech — particularly following the 2016 presidential election, during which the company was at the center of an FBI investigation into Russian interference in the election. The company’s fact-checking system, launched in 2016, is run through third-party fact-checkers certified by the International Fact-Checking Network and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. 

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in the video. “More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”

Montemayor predicts this change would be detrimental to Jewish Facebook users.

“For the Jewish community, this means that Meta is making it easier for antisemitism to flourish online. It will likely lead to an uptick in hate-posting, harassment and even a migration of white supremacists and extreme racists onto Meta’s platforms much like during the period immediately following the Twitter acquisition,” Montemayor said.

Meta often received criticism from Republicans that the fact-checkers were more favorable to Democrats and their agenda. Fact-checkers did not have the power to remove content. Rather, content was flagged for Meta to review against its community standards.

“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

In addition to lowering the bar for what content is deemed worthy of censorship, the burden of reporting disinformation and hate speech would fully fall on the responsibility of users.

“We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content,” Zuckerberg said. “The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, antisemitic rhetorics and attacks have been at an all-time high. The American Jewish Committee reported that 68% of U.S. adults saw antisemitism online or on social media. 

“This is not a victory for free speech — it’s an exchange of human bias in a small and contained group of fact-checkers for human bias at scale through Community Notes,” Montemayor said. “The only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation would be to institute legal requirements and reforms on big tech that enforce social media reform and transparency requirements.”