Donald Trump, it turns out, was not necessarily just on the receiving end of spin and slick talk when Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced in January 2025 that Instagram and Facebook would ease up on content controls.

»We’re going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. 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«, Meta’s top executive said in January 2025, as he railed against the E.U.’s tech legislation, which he called »institutionalized censorship«.