Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, played a leading role in Tuesday’s content moderation announcement.

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The fusillade of major announcements from Meta this month — including the termination of its fact-checking and DEI programs and the ascension of its enigmatic content-moderation czar, Joel Kaplan, to head global policy — prompted a familiar churn of political reaction across the left and right.

A former deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush, Kaplan joined Facebook in 2011 to expand its D.C. lobbying efforts.

Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to “restore free expression" across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have “gone too far.

Meta has announced significant changes to its hateful conduct policy, sparking widespread debate over the balance between free expression and the spread of hate speech. The company plans to remove restrictions on controversial topics,

The change is best understood not as the product of reconsidered principles but as a political message with an audience of one: Donald Trump.

Meta overhauled its approach to US moderation on Tuesday, ditching fact-checking, announcing a plan to move its trust and safety teams, and perhaps most impactfully, updating its Hateful Conduct policy. As reported by Wired, a lot of text has been updated, added, or removed, but here are some of the changes that jumped out at us.

Jewish groups celebrated a policy win when Meta banned the use of “Zionist” as a coded slur against Jews and Israel. Now, the same organizations are condemning the company for