(The Lion) — Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg told popular podcaster Joe Rogan that the social media company changed its censorship policies to support the company’s “original mission” of supporting free speech.

Meta recently announced a series of policy changes including getting rid of fact checkers, ending diversity equity and inclusion policies, and reemphasizing political content in the company’s social media feeds.

Two categories of social media posting have been politicized, said Zuckerberg: misinformation and hate speech. The change in policies will reflect toned down moderation policies that don’t punish users in those two highly subjective areas of speech.

“[B]ecause who gets to judge what’s false and what’s true?”  asked Zuckerberg.

The company said that instead of using fact checkers, who have a bias against political speech, the company will rely on a “community notes” type system similar to the one instituted by Elon Musk at X (formerly Twitter).

“The whole point of social media is basically giving people the ability to share what they want and, you know, it goes back to our original mission [which] is just give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg told Rogan in a wide ranging, three-hour conversation about the changes.

Critics on both the right and the left have doubts about the sincerity of Meta’s support for free speech and have criticized the company for reacting to political changes, not principles.

Some on the left have said that the change in policy is because the GOP will crack down against Meta if it doesn’t lighten up on censorship.

Some on the right have pointed out Zuckerberg personally donated nearly half a billion dollars towards projects that were little more than Democrat “Get Out the Vote” operations, and Meta is eager to make amends now that Republicans have been swept into power.

The Meta CEO’s comments to Rogan did indicate the change in policies on political speech were, in part, necessitated by the results of the November general elections, which saw the GOP take over the White House and the U.S. Senate, while retaining control of the House of Representatives.

“So, the good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this kind of cultural pulse … and ask] how are people thinking about it?” said Zuckerberg about political censorship.

Meta apparently decided that political censorship under the guise of fact checking was something people didn’t support.

“I think to some degree it’s because some of the people whose job is to do fact checking, a lot of their industry is focused on political fact checking, so they’re just kind of veered in that direction,” Zuckerberg said.

But the Meta CEO also said the changes were necessitated by the company’s desire to get U.S. government help to push back against European regulators.

The tech billionaire noted the European Union governments have fined big tech companies $30 billion over a 10 to 20 year period and tech companies need the help of the U.S. government to stop it.

“It’s almost like a tariff. And I think the U.S. government basically gets to decide, how are they going to deal with that?” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “Because…if some other country was screwing with another industry that we cared about, the U.S. government would probably find some way to put pressure on them. But I think what happened here is actually the complete opposite.”

Instead, he said, the U.S. government under Biden “led the … attack” on U.S. tech companies which gave the E.U. the green light to go after American technology companies.

Zuckerberg also said his discussions with President-elect Donald Trump led him to believe that the incoming president will protect American technology companies.

Zuckerberg said that while some previous content moderation policies were “well-intentioned” originally, the Biden administration often strong-armed Meta into censoring content with both overt and not-so subtle threats.

“I mean, basically these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse” for not removing content from the platform that the Biden team found objectionable, he told Rogan.

That included content that was unarguably “true,” Zuckerberg added.

The Biden administration and liberals weren’t afraid to use the government to attack Meta more subtly as a means of getting Meta to censor content, he said.

“So, we had [government agencies] that were looking into us that were not really involved with social media, like the [The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] … the financial organization that Elizabeth Warren had set up. … And it’s basically like, we’re not a bank. It’s like, ‘What does Meta have to do with this?’ But they kind of found some theory that they wanted to investigate,” against the company as a means of applying pressure, Zuckerberg said.

The Meta CEO also said the company will still close down accounts that are bad actors, such as accounts tied to terrorism, accounts tied to hacking and accounts tied to foreign governments.

But going forward for Meta platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, if it’s “okay to say on the floor of Congress, you should probably be able to debate it on social media,” he concluded.