1 day Ago By Benjamin Weingarten
Two weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump — a man who has vowed to dismantle and destroy the Censorship-Industrial Complex that silenced him and millions of other Americans — one of the figures most responsible for the censorship regime delivered a message. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company had engaged in “too much censorship,” and declared that with the “cultural tipping point” of recent elections, his platforms would now be undertaking efforts to “restore free expression.” But has the tech titan really seen the light on free speech, and will Meta truly overhaul itself accordingly? Or is this a cynical and self-interested attempt to beg for forgiveness/pay for protection with shifting political winds, leading to cosmetic and temporary reforms? Prudence demands that we distrust and verify.
Remember, Meta used internal tools to suppress traffic to conservative content after the 2016 election. It censored The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story . It participated in the fed-led Election Integrity Partnership, responsible for purging wrongthink about election integrity and outcomes during the 2020 election.
It booted Trump from the platform for two years after January 6 — reinstating his accounts only with “heightened penalties for repeat offenses.” It purged dissent from COVID-ian orthodoxy en masse. The consequences have been incalculable for the individuals, activists, and journalists silenced and the body politic itself.
Are those who have had their rights violated when Meta acted as the feds’ deputized speech police just supposed to accept this 180? What about the outlets who lost traffic and saw their business models imperiled? And how about the American public at large that lost out on critical news and views that could have swung the 2020 election — allowing us to avoid the disasters of the last four years — or led to pandemic mitigation measures that would have protected our liberty and preserved our prosperity rather than eroding them both? The least Zuckerberg could do, as The Post’s Miranda Devine has suggested, is open the Facebook Files so Americans can get a full accounting of Meta’s censorship efforts, which would form the basis for informing executive action, legislation, and potential lawsuits. And to that end, shouldn’t Zuckerberg support — with released documents, if not legal and financial support — those engaged in litigation right now against federal authorities aimed at prohibiting their collusion, coercion and cajoling of social media platforms to censor protected speech? Should Zuckerberg not also provide some sort of restitution to those who lost their accounts under censorious policies barring their core political speech without any sort of due process — particularly if those policies came under government duress? Does Zuckerberg believe that Meta wrongly silenced millions of Americans? If so, does he believe that these go-forward changes constitute justice? Zuckerberg has changed his tune as the Censorship-Industrial Complex and Meta’s role in it was exposed under growing legal, political and media scrutiny — and with President Trump’s political prospects rising and Silicon Valley figures rallying around him. He is largely following in the retreating footsteps of others.
De facto brand cartels like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media , which colluded in effect to starve conservative and independent media of ad dollars, shuttered. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the center of Fed-led speech policing, supposedly curtailed its social media content flagging-for-takedown activities. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, another key government cog in the censorship regime, closed — though that its people and funds have been “realigned” suggests it may have been a death in name only.
Key NGO cutouts like the Stanford Internet Observatory have ceased some activities and seen critical personnel leave. Meta’s moves also follow Elon Musk’s liberation of competitor X. The positive about his proposed reforms, even if driven by expedience, is that Zuckerberg’s moves reflect a substantial shift in political and cultural power to the side of free speech.
Nevertheless, the “counter-disinformation” ecosystem persists. It encompasses the administrative state, some state authorities, much of Big Tech, leading universities, prominent NGOs, risk-raters, fact-checkers, and censorious governments worldwide. Regimes that powerful do not go away without a major fight.
It will be up to the Trump administration and those in Congress who have vowed to win this war for free speech to starve the Censorship-Industrial Complex of government funding, purge it of its personnel, and use every lever of power to protect our First Amendment. And it will be incumbent upon those like Meta to take concrete steps to do right by the victims of the censorship regime they imposed. Benjamin Weingarten is editor at large at RealClearInvestigations.
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