Zuckerberg Announces Seismic Shift Away from Censorship at Facebook
An extraordinary announcement from Meta's CEO includes a clear admission that Facebook was censoring users at the behest of the US government.
This link will take you to Zuckerberg’s astonishing five-minute video, which is worth watching. He admits, “We’ve reached a point where there are too many mistakes and too much censorship.” The company is changing course on this because of a “cultural tipping point of once again prioritizing speech.”
As he explains, “We are going to get back to our roots and focus on… restoring free expression one our platform.” This includes getting rid of “fact checkers” and replacing them with Community Notes, similar to X—a crowdsourced open system that works remarkably well for skeptics to challenge posted claims, without blocking people from seeing those posts. He admits, “the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the U.S.”
Furthermore, he explains, “We’re going 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 explains that filters will not longer automatically censor low priority violations, focusing instead on illegal content that is not constitutionally protected speech. The company has been getting feedback that people want to see more civic-political content, which Facebook had previously deprioritized. Facebook is also moving its content moderation teams from California to Texas, probably a wise business decision but also one that might change the cultural context and bias of those teams.
Zuckerberg says here that they are also going to work with President Trump on pushing back against foreign countries that are trying to strong-arm American social media companies into censoring on behest of those regimes. As he explains:
The U.S. 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 [like Brazil] have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take content down. China has prevented our apps from even working in their Country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government. That’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other countries to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.
We are witnessing a major shift here in the right direction. Facebook was among the worst offenders when it came to caving into government-sponsored censorship. We are now winning on this issue.
Call me a skeptic, I don't believe a word he says. It's whatever way the wind is blowing, in his favor.
A good shift in policy. The whole matter of 'fact-checkers' is dubious, deceptive and dishonest. But numbers of my friends on Facebook are announcing they are leaving the platform because they won't be able to rely on fact-checkers to tell them what to believe. Part of the fallout of the last four years is that many among us look to 'fact-checkers' to tell them what to believe. Citizen ability to have debates (in fact any debate at all) about important issues, like freedom of speech, is hobbled. The damage this Age of Censorship has wrought has distorted many a persons discernment. While I celebrate your post, I know others who if I shared it would be aghast. For them the 'fact-checkers' are still regarded almost like Moses coming down Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments.
Nonetheless, I'll take this win and savor it.