Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss Meta's recent policy shifts under Mark Zuckerberg: removing fact-checkers, adding community notes, and moving moderation to Texas. They cover impacts on free speech, content moderation, and ad revenue, plus a spike in account-deletion searches.
Mark Zuckerberg, you saw the video that he made, right?
Yeah, on how he is getting rid of fact-checkers. We're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.
Yeah. So, okay, Mark Zuckerberg. So these are Meta's big changes. So Mark Zuckerberg is, quote unquote, restoring free speech. And so what he's doing now is— so he's saying, okay, we're going to add community notes, we're going to get rid of our fact-checkers. Okay, that's one big piece of it, which, by the way, they had 40,000 people employed as fact-checkers. No. 40,000 people.
40,000?
Yep.
You're serious?
Yeah, I'm not joking. 40,000 people. And here's the other— here's what I really loved. He's moving the content moderation team out of California to Texas so it's less politically biased. And he kind of mentioned some other things in passing. He's like, look, man, like, let's stop. Let's have less filters. Let's focus on the big problems. Let's not talk about immigration. Let's not talk about gender ideology. Let's Let's bring back political discourse. We can bring back disagreements. It's okay to have these things now, right? And I applaud him for doing this because he— it kind of is going in the direction of X where it's kind of a free-for-all and people are saying what they want.
Yeah.
And sure, like things, okay, you know, if someone says they're gonna hurt someone, like, yes, that should be censored and that should be taken off. But for the most part, free speech is about, let's say I don't like you. Free speech is about letting people that you don't like say the things that you don't like. And being able to disagree with them.
You saw how, uh, there's a big spike in search queries for uninstalling or deleting your Meta account and, uh, deleting your Instagram account, right?
I saw that. But so, so many people are, are taking that and being like, oh, Mark Zuckerberg is taking away free speech, or he's hurting free speech. Or, you know, you see all these, uh, a lot of these people that are, let's just say, um, I don't know, let's not make it political, but a lot of people that are trying to attack him over it. But continue your thought.
No, I think it doesn't matter. And I think he's making the right call even though some people are quote unquote trying to delete their account. Well, those people probably had very little followers.
And they'll be back.
Eventually they will.
Yeah.
Check this out on my screen, okay? These are my Meta ads getting rejected. First one, are you struggling to attract qualified leads, reach the right audience at the right time and data-driven strategies, right? And it's going on and on. I don't know what they got.
How long ago was this?
This is from a few days ago. Okay. Look, ads rejected. Ads about social issues, elections, or politics. More ads about elections, politics. And I'm like, what election or political information is in there? So there are 40,000 people or whoever's reviewing all this stuff doesn't understand that a video on marketing has nothing to do with social issues, elections, and politics. I'm talking about driving traffic to your website and converting it into customers. Dude.
And I applaud him for, for cutting down on like the 40,000 people. That's way overstaffed.
Way too much.
Community notes on X. I love community notes. It's— I haven't seen it screw up often. And community notes, by the way, when you put it up, it's like you or me posting something and other people verifying it. And yes, that to me seems like it's a lot more efficient. And to Mark Zuckerberg's credit, he gave Elon credit. He gave X credit. He said, hey, look, we're following their lead, right? The other thing is I like that he's doing this at the right time. So he's not choosing— because Elon will jump into things headfirst, right? He's more of like the second wave. He'll wait for the temperature to be good and then he'll dip his toes in. So it's actually very safe for him to say this during this time. We're safer than when like Elon's jumping in. Elon will like take all the arrows initially.
He did.
And then Mark Zuckerberg will just come in. And I think he's doing the right thing ultimately. And those that say, oh, I'm leaving, it's like when that guy Don Lemon, was leaving X. He's like, posted that he's leaving X. And it's like, dude, nobody gives a crap that you're leaving X. So everyone that says you're leaving, good luck with that because they have WhatsApp, they have Threads, they have, they have what? They have Facebook. What else do they have?
All right.
So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer the All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Uh, Instagram, uh, WhatsApp. Yeah, yeah. So they have all those, right? So good luck trying to stay away from all those apps.
You can't. Yeah, it's like saying, hey, I'm not gonna use WhatsApp to communicate. All right, there goes half the world that you can't talk to anymore.
And to Neil's point, showing the ads, I think we're gonna see a lot. We're gonna see a renaissance in more, uh, more ads coming up. And then also more people are gonna spend, so Meta's gonna make more money from this too.
Yep.
Goodbye, guys. That's it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster, and we'll see you tomorrow.
