Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced changes to content moderation on Facebook and Instagram long sought by conservatives. Incoming President Donald Trump said the new approach was “probably” due to threats he made against the technology mogul.

The move to replace third-party fact-checking with user-written “community notes” similar to those on Trump backer Elon Musk’s social platform X is the latest example of a media company moving to accommodate the incoming administration. It comes on the four-year anniversary of Zuckerberg banning Trump from his platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Zuckerberg has been a target of Trump and his allies since he donated $400 million to help local officials run the 2020 election during the coronavirus pandemic. Those donations became part of a false narrative that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump, although there has never been any evidence of widespread fraud or problems that would have changed that result. Nonetheless, Republican-controlled states have banned future donations to local elections offices and Trump himself threatened to imprison Zuckerberg in a book published in September, during the peak of the presidential campaign.

Zuckerberg released a video Tuesday using some of the language that conservatives have long used to criticize his platforms, saying it was time to prioritize “free expression” and that fact-checkers had become “politically biased.” Zuckerberg said he is moving Meta’s content moderation team from California, a blue state, to red state Texas, and lifting restrictions on some immigration and gender discussions. Meta had no immediate comment on how many people might be relocated.

At a press conference hours later, Trump praised the changes.

“I think they’ve come a long way, Meta,” Trump said. When asked if he believed Zuckerberg made the changes in response to threats the incoming president has made, Trump responded: “Probably.”

Meta is among several tech companies apparently working to get in Trump’s good graces before he takes office later this month. Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in December, and Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump at the his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Zuckerberg this week also appointed a key Trump ally, Ultimate Fighting Championship Chief Executive Dana White, to Meta’s board. Amazon announced a documentary on incoming First Lady Melania Trump. ABC News, which is owned by Disney, last month settled a libel suit filed by Trump with a $15 million payment to Trump’s presidential library foundation.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, called the Meta changes part of “a pattern of powerful people and institutions kowtowing to the president in a way that suggests they’re fearful of being targeted.”

Nyhan said that’s a grave risk to the country.

“We have in many ways an economy that’s the envy of the world and people come here to start businesses because they don’t have to be aligned with the governing regime like they do in the rest of the world,” Nyhan said. “That’s being called into question.”

Except for YouTube, Meta’s Facebook is by far the most used social media platform in the U.S. According to the Pew Research Center, about 68% of American adults use Facebook, a number that has largely held steady since 2016. Teenagers, however, have fled Facebook over the past decade, with just 32% reporting they used it in a 2024 survey.

Meta began fact checks in December 2016, after Trump was elected to his first term, in response to criticism that “fake news” was spreading on its platforms. For years, the tech giant boasted it was working with more than 100 organizations in over 60 languages to combat misinformation.