Yesterday, Meta president Mark Zuckerberg made global waves by announcing that the company would return to its roots by restoring free expression on the platform.

In a five-minute video, Zuckerberg explained why, over the past few years—i.e., during the Biden-Harris administration—the company was pushed by U.S. policymakers to crack down on free speech and censor Americans on Facebook and Instagram. That also emboldened other countries to push for wider censorship. Consequently, too many users were silenced or placed in Facebook jail for the crime of speaking their minds. Furthermore, he admitted political bias in moderating content and the political motivations of policymakers in using the platform for their ends. Enough is enough. 

This is a good move, but we have to wonder why now and how long will it last?

The impetus for Zuckerberg’s latest actions dates back five years when he advocated for more free speech online—even speech he disagrees with. However, yesterday he explained troubling trends over the past four years that careened the company in a dangerous direction:

There’s been widespread debate about the 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. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts.

 

That’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.

In a lengthier blog post, the company laid out the changes to begin immediately:

  • Get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S.
  • Simplify content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender.
  • Change enforcement by focusing filters that scan for policy violations on tackling illegal and high-severity violations. They will depend on someone reporting lower-severity violations before taking action. 
  • Phase civic content back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
  • Relocate their trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California. U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas. 
  • Work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that seek to push U.S. companies toward greater censorship.

These are welcomed steps for the company to take but arrive too late to fix the damage done. As I noted in IWF’s statement yesterday:

Conservative and contrarian viewpoints have been enemy #1 of repressive activists and policymakers, who’ve successfully used social media platforms to silence good Americans. Facebook now follows X in recalibrating to embrace free speech and live up to its stated ideals of offering a place ‘to be heard and to have a voice.’ We hope this awakening spreads to other platforms.

 

And, it would be a good gesture that Meta apologizes or at least acknowledges the professionals and individuals whose reputations and livelihoods were destroyed by the company’s censorship regime.

Late is better than never, I suppose.

However, Meta’s announcements reveal a few truths that it, leftists, and the legacy media denied for years:

  • Facebook widely censored unpopular, conservative, or contrarian viewpoints. We were first told there was no evidence of this and then that liberals were equally censored.
  • The restrictions on content, which they denied being in place, were indeed in place.
  • Organic content that regular people posted was hidden and deprioritized to avoid others seeing it.
  • Content moderation teams are biased (against certain viewpoints).
  • Fact-checkers are biased activists, not purveyors of unbiased truth.
  • Censorship was driven in part by politics and in part by biased staff. 

Many on Twitter pointed out these revelations and others:

Whether one believes that Zuckerberg (a) had a sudden change of heart, (b) is currying favor with the incoming Trump administration, or (c) is trying to woo back a user base that quit the platform, the biggest question is the permanence of these reforms. Is this U-turn for the next four years, or will they turn back again to embrace the same policies and actions if the government changes hands or a high-profile event such as a pandemic occurs?

Also, would Meta have enacted these reforms had President-elect Trump lost and Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidency? After all, it was her administration that pushed platforms like Facebook and Instagram to censor content on COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccine, climate change, gender ideology, the Biden family, and even Trump’s assassination attempts.

Others are more incredulous about Zuckerberg’s motives:

Bottom Line

Meta embracing free speech by axing fact checkers, scaling back on content moderation, welcoming all viewpoints, fighting the influence of its staff and content moderators’ political bias, and cracking down on illegal content rather than unpopular content are welcomed moves that should be permanent. Free speech demands a place for viewpoints that are uncomfortable, unconventional, or unpopular.