The impending inauguration of Donald Trump as the next President continues to have positive effects. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would drop its third-party fact-checkers, use community notes like X, and restore free speech.
Zuckerberg confessed the government and Big Media pushed too hard to censor people on Meta platforms, especially after Trump won in 2016. Zuckerberg admitted that the systems to moderate content got out of control.
According to Zuckerberg, “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”
“Too politically biased?” Zuckerberg has a capacity for understatement that may be unrivaled in today’s world. Censoring just 1% of posts results in millions of people being deprived of their free speech rights.
America is not the EU. Free speech is part of America’s DNA. Shutting down opinions just because you do not agree with them is the opposite of what America stands for. Zuckerberg took a shot at the departing administration:
“The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies. It has emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.”
It will be interesting to watch the evolution of this. There is probably little doubt that Zuckerberg’s change of heart is political. It should be noted that, in August, Zuckerberg told the world how the White House and FBI “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor COVID content and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Was Zuckerberg hedging his bets at that point? Did he foresee a Trump victory and was he moving to better align with a potential change of administration? Time will tell.
Regardless, once again PDJT has had a positive effect for the American people.