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Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a roll-back of censorship policies across the social media platforms owned by the tech behemoth on Tuesday (January 7, 2025).
Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram infamously participated in extensive censorship of verifiably true information in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, including the “theory” that Covid-19 virus was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the legitimacy of the laptop containing dozens of pieces of evidence of Hunter Biden committing felonies.
Zuckerberg also personally contributed nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to harvest ballots on behalf of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. His “Zucker-Buck” scheme took advantage of last-minute Covid-inspired rules changes in multiple swing states to elevate this zombified-candidate to an unprecedented level of electoral success.
Although Zuckerberg undoubtedly drove this unprecedented vote-harvesting operation – one which unsurprisingly wasn’t replicated outside of the fraud-prone, mass mail-in ballot environment – he was quick to throw Biden under the bus by revealing the constitutionally dubious demands made by the administration on social media firms.
Sensing a sea-change in American electoral politics, Zuckerberg sent the U.S. House judiciary committee a mea-culpa letter last summer accusing the Biden administration of demanding social media firms censor content that the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from censoring directly.
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Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:
— House Judiciary GOP ?????? (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024
1. Biden-Harris Admin "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans.
2. Facebook censored Americans.
3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K
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Now, just weeks away from Donald Trump‘s inauguration, Zuckerberg doubled-down on distancing himself – and his firm – from its prior track record of censorship.
“I started building social media to give people a voice,” Zuckerberg said in a recently published video explaining the forthcoming changes. “Over the last several years, there’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there… drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.”
Zuckerberg explained that his firm intends to continue removing legitimately harmful and criminal content, but indicated they will be making serious changes to avoid continued ideologically biased censorship.
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Mark Zuckerberg just announced that both FB and Meta will fire fact checkers and use a new community notes system like X instead.
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) January 7, 2025
He admits fact checkers are too politically biased and that he needs Trump’s help to stop other countries from censoring content.
Elon’s courage… pic.twitter.com/DPO0sohQfS
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“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg added. “First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X.”
X’s system lets users flag untrue information and generate fact-checks independent of platform-selected truth arbiters. Zuckerberg also indicated Meta platforms will allow for the discussion of previously-throttled topics.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote non stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” he continued. “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.”
Zuckerberg added that Meta was planning to “simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far, so I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms,” he explained.
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RELATED | FACEBOOK COMES CLEAN ON PRIOR CENSORSHIP
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Meta engineers will also make automated content-filters less stringent, something Zuckerberg said “means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but will also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Zuckerberg also said Instagram and Facebook would return to promoting “civic content.”
“For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” he said. “But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads.”
Meta’s content moderation offices will also be relocated from California to Texas, a location Zuckerberg said will cause “less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Considering his previous participation in legally dubious schemes to defeat Trump, it was surprising to hear Zuckerberg express an interest in working with the incoming president to wield American power and push back on global efforts to stifle free speech.
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“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” he said. “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.”
According to Zuckerberg, the U.S. hasn’t been much better.
“Even the U.S. 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,” he said.
Given Zuckerberg’s history of gleefully trampling on free expression, FITSNews will closely track how serious the tech mogul is about making his platforms true public squares for meaningful debates.
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Zuckerberg’s recent character arc has taken him from alienesque mega-nerd to jiu-jitsu practicing sun-tanned weightlifter. Perhaps an increase in testosterone – and some time in the sun – has fueled a genuine reevaluation of his past conduct. Or, perhaps he’s making another politically expedient play for his personal benefit.
Only time will tell.
Count of FITSNews to continue to host our own marketplace of ideas, and to hold to account anyone who appoints themselves as policers of thought…
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
(Via: Travis Bell)
Dylan Nolan is the director of special projects at FITSNews. He graduated from the Darla Moore school of business in 2021 with an accounting degree. Got a tip or story idea for Dylan? Email him here. You can also engage him socially @DNolan2000.
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2 comments
Fact checking is not censorship, Opie.
The lack of self-awareness by MAGA is astounding. Elon and Trump literally kick people off their “social networks” if they criticize them and report things they don’t want people to know, but somehow letting someone post what they wish to and pointing out that it is not accurate is censorship. Really?
What is irresponsible is creating a network where billionaires can lie unchallenged. Then fake news can then say Elon says this and Trump says that without taking any personal responsibility to find out whether anything they are saying is true. Trump is the most lying President in history. You can’t trust one thing that he says, and like Putin, he wants a press that will obediently back him up while he punishes anyone who challenges him.
In the modern era, the free press is just not up to the task of dealing with a lying President, his billionaire cohorts, and the plethora of bought and paid-for fake news, lying podcasters, and websites they control with their limitless money. Democracy is not dying in the dark it is being drowned in money.
In Citizens United, our Supreme Court took the position that money is speech. It was a disgusting lie by a bought-and-paid-for court. As many people pointed out, if money is speech the rich have a bullhorn and everyone else is mute. Well, here we are. Let’s hope it’s not too late to save ourselves, but I am not optimistic.