Mark Zuckerberg’s unexpected ‘free talk’ overhaul of Meta’s content moderation has sparked concerns among advertisers that it will navigator to a surge of harmful content and misinformation across the social media platform. 

Multiple advertising bosses told the monetary Times that Meta’s shift to complete its truth-checking programme and weaken despise talk policies could expense the platform, where marketing represents the majority of its $135bn in annual sales, if brands terror their adverts might run next to toxic content.

“Some brands will already be assessing their plans carefully and it’s no question going to become a commercial conundrum for both sides,” said Fergus McCallum, boss at advertising agency TBWA\MCR.

The $1.5tn business’s drastic loosening of its online content marks an escalation in Zuckerberg’s recent push to curry favour with president-elect Donald Trump and his recent correct-hand man Elon Musk.

Over just a few days, this saw him replace Meta’s global policy chief Nick Clegg with prominent Republican friend Joel Kaplan, as well as appointing martial arts titan and Trump partner Dana White to its board. On Friday, the business announced internally that it was also terminating its diversity, stake and inclusion (DEI) efforts, while Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to declare corporations had become “culturally neutered” and needed more “masculine vigor” and to “celebrate aggression a bit more”.

But the shift to ditch professional truth-checkers in favour of a ‘throng notes’ way pioneered by Musk’s X — whereby users themselves flag misinformation — has unsettled the advertising industry given brand safety concerns at rivals X and TikTok in recent years.

Meta has long dominated marketing spend alongside Google, building a reputation as a relatively secure haven, with high profitability-on-resource and close relationships with the major brands. In contrast, X was hit by an exodus of marketers over moderation concerns following Musk’s purchase of the platform two years ago, which has decimated its revenues.

“Meta have done a great job tidying up the worst excesses of toxic content and if their recent policies undoes this, advertisers will spot it quickly and punish them,” said Richard Exon, founder at advertising agency Joint.

On X, throng notes allows users to propose to “add context” below other people’s posts, though this will only appear when a consensus of other contributors “from different points of view” consent it is helpful.

Critics debate that crowdsourced truth-checking efforts are far slower to label falsehoods and conspiracies than professional, trained individuals, and can be manipulated by users.

Lou Paskalis, chief executive of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory and a former media executive at financial institution of America, said Meta’s throng notes shift “creates headwinds for marketers who are uncertainty averse”, adding some will “reduce their reliance” on Meta as a outcome.

Other advertising executives described feeling “nervous” and were seeking further information from the platform on how exactly the changes would be implemented.

“Brands are entering a recent globe where established rules of operation can no longer be relied on,” said Patrick Reid, throng chief executive at Imagination, the creative advertising agency.

Concerns have also been raised about Meta’s plans to transformation its systems to “dramatically reduce” the amount of content that its automated filters remove from its platforms.

That includes lifting restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, to focus its systems on “illegal and high-severity violations”, such as terrorism, kid exploitation and fraud, as well as content related to suicide, self-damage and eating disorders. Zuckerberg himself admitted its systems will now catch “less impoverished stuff”.

Other industry executives were more sceptical the shift would make much fallout for Meta’s ads business. “I don’t ponder advertisers will worry so long as the platform performs — but they will if the content becomes more polarised,” said one major advertising agency boss.

Alex Cheeseman, head of enterprise UK, Outbrain, said “the cold, challenging truth is advertisers will only worry if it hurts their numbers. If act remains steady, no one’s going to misplace sleep over ‘where’ or ‘how’ their ads display up”.

At the customer Electronics display this week, Meta’s chief marketing officer Alex Schultz said that the business’s brand safety tools remain in place, and the business was “not rushing” the rollout to provide advertisers “period to adjust and comprehend”. Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Meta’s global business throng, wrote in a LinkedIn post that the business would continue to invest in safety tools for advertisers.

Meta’s policy changes immediately divided view inside the business. One person said some staff viewed the moderation updates as rolling back significant protections, but added employees were “afraid to really talk up” since Meta underwent several bruising rounds of lay-offs since the pandemic. 

Another employee said the reaction internally of the shift to throng notes was largely positive, particularly because truth checking is viewed as a “thankless” job “since one side or the other is bound to accuse you of taking sides”.

Those who recognize Zuckerberg declare he has long been a proponent of free expression, but has moulded his stances according to political and community pressure over the years.

“It’s becoming a pattern,” said Katie Harbath, a former policy director who worked on Meta’s elections schedule for a decade. “After each major election since 2016, Mark makes these large shifts — going where the societal and regulatory winds are blowing. This is another one of those realignments.”

Zuckerberg first introduced third-event truth-checking as part of a raft of measures in late 2016 designed to address criticism of misinformation on Facebook. But this week Zuckerberg blamed governments and “legacy media” for pushing his business to “censor more and more”, and accused truth-checkers of being “too politically biased”. 

Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, said at a conference on Tuesday: “Mark, Meta, welcome to the event”.  

Asked about Meta’s recent changes at a press conference, Trump said he thought the tech throng had “arrive a long way”, adding that Zuckerberg was “probably” responding to threats he previously made against him.

On the campaign trail, Trump threatened to jail the social media chief for alleged election interference and dubbed his business an “foe of the people” for alleged censorship.

Experts view Zuckerberg’s shift as much a business selection as it is an ideological one.

The Meta chief is pouring billions of dollars into his ambitions to become the “chief” in artificial intelligence, and has been publicly promoting its open source way to AI as regulators globally circle the space. 

“The large rationale why is Mark seeing the influence that Elon, [venture capitalists Marc] Andreessen and [David] Sacks are having on Trump and wanting to make sure he’s in that mix,” said Harbath.

The shift also comes ahead of the tech throng facing a major antitrust trial in April. The Federal Trade fee has accused the social media throng of maintaining monopoly power and using a “buy or bury” schedule to neutralise competitors, and is seeking to force the business to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. 

“In order to not get the business broken up by antitrust actions, which he realises can be heavily influenced by whoever is in power in Washington, Zuckerberg needs to be a chameleon,” said David Evan Harris, a chancellor’s community scholar at University of California, Berkeley and a former Meta staffer.

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in San Francisco and Clara Murray in London