By Jo Nova
Suddenly free speech is cool again
This is not the Tipping Point they were expecting.
Now that the election is safely over, Mark Zuckerberg, the coward, admits that censorship went too far and free speech is important. He’s decided that Facebook and Instagram will drop the third party “fact checkers” that crushed content and banned people because the “fact checkers” made too many mistakes. (Of course, he doesn’t admit that these were not mistakes at all, but entirely the plan.)
As David Evans (the other half) says “Reminds me of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. It was the end of another leftist regime based on censorship and cancelling. The good news just kept on coming.”
It’s a very limited mea culpa — it was just good intentions and a bit of scope creep you know…
It’s not like he was interfering in elections, tilting the balance to buy political protection, increase his profits, or score points at dinner parties with billionaire friends.
From the Press Release:
More Speech and Fewer Mistakes
In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.
And it was only “harmless content” that was lost and a bit of frustration was caused — it’s not like people died, wallowed in jail, or got attacked by illegal immigrants due to their loss of free speech:
Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.
The Fact Checkers turned out to have their own biases:
If his plan was to give more expert opinions so “the people could judge” it does seem odd that they hired 20 year old nobodies with no qualifications to censor Harvard Professors in medicine.
The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.
We’re not buying this miracle, Zuck, of how the people were supposed to be able to judge what they couldn’t see and never read…
It was just terribly bad luck the fact checkers all happened to support the same side of politics that Zuckerberg donated $400 million dollars to in 2020:
That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.
He openly admits that the Twitter community notes policy is much better and will adopt it
It’s unusual in the business world to see someone copy a competitor (and openly say so):
We plan to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year. As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it.
And unusual too, that his competitor is happy.Elon Musk says “This is cool”.
And also like Musk, Zuckerberg is sending the policy brains team to Texas — realizing ten years too late, that the Californian bubble is not the place to connect with most Americans:
… we will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations.
Suddenly people will be able to discuss immigration and gender identity
Just toss those sacred cows out the window…
We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented.
How telling that he picks these topics. Immigration, especially is the hot button issue in the US, UK and Europe. This change will come through in mere weeks, he says, leaving us wondering if Zuckerberg suddenly realized Facebook and Instagram were in danger of being 100% irrelevant in the real world. A cruel observer might say that his interest in free speech was purely profit driven (or an act of desperation).
When will he let people discuss their medical experiences?
At ZeroHedge, they point out that it’s just over a month since Zuckerberg met Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and only one day after one of Trump’s closest allies joined the board of Facebook — the UFC CEO Dana White. Perhaps Trump gave him one last chance (with conditions)?
It’s all a step in the right direction. But after censoring ICU Specialists who were trying to save lives and who turned out to be right, Zuckerberg is going to have to do a lot more than mouthing the weak words of “mistakes”. The nicest possible interpretation is that as a mere double-digit billionaire, (unlike Musk) Zuckerberg was squeezed by the Blob until he complied. The US government could have put him out of business in five minutes if he offended them. But where is that story? His country — the world — really needs to hear the real mea culpa.
UPDATE: Meta’s chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan says “they’ll cooperate with the Australian government on the under-16 social media ban, but stresses, “the right way to do it is to trust parents to know what’s best for their children.” This kind of pressure from Big Tech and from the US Government may end the Australian governments attempt to force digital ID’s upon us.
Nothing can compensate for the damage to lives that could have been avoided, but there are plenty of people out whose losses can be cut quickly:
— Jason Olbourne – (The Daily Australian) (@JasonQCitizen1) January 7, 2025
As Zuckerberg avoids a prison cell announcing the end of fact checkers and vastly reducing censorship, I am still waiting for my ‘appeal’ against a heinous false charge with no evidence, no due process and no way to get in touch which disabled 17 years worth of work, the past ten…
Letting all those people out of Facebook jail would be a start.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash