Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to scale back Meta’s content moderation policies on Friday. appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zuckerberg faced widespread criticism for the decision, including from employees within his own company.

“It probably depends on who you ask,” Zuckerberg said when asked how the Meta updates were received.

the key updates Meta announced this week so it ended its independent fact-checker program and replaced it with a community notes program like X. This means that Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will rely more on community members to flag of wrong information. The company also said it will increase the thresholds for its automatic content filters. This means that fewer bad posts on Meta platforms will be automatically removed, but also that fewer good posts will be mistakenly removed. And it was not announced in the Meta, but It reportedly eliminated DEI’s largest effort.

In a wide-ranging, candid conversation that lasted nearly three hours, Zuckerberg explained why he’s pivoting his social media platforms, as he says, back to their roots of free expression. .

“You only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice,” said Meta’s CEO. “The whole point of social media is basically giving people the ability to share what they want. It goes back to our original mission to empower people to share and make the world more open and connected.

It is impossible to ignore the timing of these decisions. Zuckerberg announced these changes just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The former President-elect says the CEO of Meta is plotting against him in the 2020 electionand reportedly threatened Zuckerberg with jail if he did it again.

When it comes to Trump, Zuckerberg said he is very optimistic about the future president because he “just wants America to win.” The CEO noted how important it is to have a government that defends American tech companies abroad, seemingly pointing out the review faced by Meta in the European Union.

However, Zuckerberg admitted that the timing of these changes was coincidental, and that there is no good time for major changes in content moderation. In fact, Meta’s CEO said these changes have been a long time coming.

“I was really worried from the beginning about being this kind of decider of what’s real in the world,” Zuckerberg said. “That’s kind of a crazy position for the billions of people who use your service.”

Over the past decade, Meta’s CEO says people have started to push for ideologically-based censorship on his platforms. He specifically pointed to two events where this happened: the 2016 election for the US president and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Zuckerberg said the Biden administration forced them to take down real information. The Meta CEO said that some of the concerns around the side effects of the vaccine taken by Meta at the time should not have been dismissed as misinformation.

The Meta CEO told Rogan that X and Twitter “just do it better than us” on the subject of content moderation, noting how his platforms will adopt the community notes feature. Especially, a number of advertisers have left X in recent years due to its content moderation policiesan exodus that X is now challenging in court as a conspiracy.

Rogan and Zuckerberg moved from moderating content to a wide range of topics during Friday’s episode, including jiu-jitsu, AI, and the broader shift in American culture.

Meta’s CEO said he sees a sea change happening, where people trust government officials and no established media. In their place, social media creators and podcast hosts, like Rogan himself, have gained influence and credibility.

This sentiment can be seen in Meta’s recent transfer news of its platforms, where the company has been for a while stopped promoting news or political content everything. However, Zuckerberg signaled this week that this will happen restore this political content to its promotional algorithms.

At another point, Zuckerberg noted how Western society, and especially corporate America, has become “emasculated” and “neutered.” He defended the need for a masculine presence in the country and its businesses.

Several times throughout the podcast, Zuckerberg suggested that he had been deferring to the media for the past 10 years, and blaming things beyond his control. This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has said Meta will take less responsibility for all that is bad on the platform going on. However, he appeared to be more outspoken and bold on the subject than ever during the conversation on Friday.

“We just got to this point where there are things you can’t say (on our platforms) that are mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said, referring to how Meta has silenced conservative voices.

Meta CEO brings up how Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is back stated that women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles. Zuckerberg said that under the previous rules of moderation of the content of Meta, these comments were not allowed because they did not include a protected category of people. Under Meta’s new policies, these comments will be okay, Zuckerberg said.

“If it’s okay to say it on the floor of Congress, you should have this debate on social media,” he said.

In Dana White, the CEO of Meta said that he added the president of the UFC to his board of directors because of his entrepreneurial leadership, and to have more people with a “strong backbone” in his company.

“We have a lot of governments and people around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company and we need some strong people to advise us on how to handle these situations,” Zuckerberg told White.