Meta going down Twitter’s path won’t end the same way

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest pivot isn’t without some risk. Mark Zuckerberg may be taking a page from Elon Musk’s playbook.

But the Facebook founder’s social network empire stands little chance of suffering a similar fate to Twitter. Investors seemed nervous it would at first. Shares of Meta Platforms slid nearly 6% in the week following Zuckerberg’s Jan.

7 announcement that he was ending the company’s internal fact-checking program and replacing it with a user-based system to flag problematic content. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a post on the company’s Threads service. He said Meta would continue to focus on “tackling illegal and high-severity violations," but added that the new rules would require “much higher confidence" before the company removes content.

Facebook is going the way of Twitter, in other words. Zuckerberg made little effort to disguise that fact—even citing by name the “community notes" feature that replaced company-led moderation after Musk bought the microblogging platform and changed its name to X in 2022. But that turned out to be a costly move for the centibillionaire, as advertisers fled the platform fearing an onslaught of misinformation and unsavory content.

Musk said a year later that the company was worth about $19 billion—less than half of what he paid for it. Still, a similar outcome is unlikely at Facebook and Instagram. For one thing, both platforms are much larger and more vital to advertisers than Twitter ever was.