Meta ends censorship because of Trump, CEO plays victim
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced the company will no longer censor users for expressing their views, which entails also ending its “fact-checking” program.
After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, tech companies like Meta became increasingly concerned with weeding out “misinformation.” They contracted with Left-wing “fact-checking” organizations that decide whether content is true or false, with most conservative viewpoints declared false. Social media platforms suppress any content labeled “misinformation” by fact-checkers and suspend users who post the content. These fact-checkers include PolitiFact, which is funded by Google, George Soros, Bill Gates, the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, and other globalist organizations.
Social media companies hold contracts with more than one fact-checking organization, which they pay generously. Meta has been paying RMIT University’s FactLab, for example, $800 per fact check, adding up to $40,000 a month. The social media giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, has previously acknowledged working with at least 10 different fact-checking groups.
‘We’re in a new era now’
In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Zuckerberg claimed to have always championed free speech and expression.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said in a video Tuesday. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg acknowledged that “we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” but blamed it on the Biden administration and mainstream media.
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political,” he said, adding that the company’s sudden devotion to free speech is because of Trump’s election victory: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
At another point in the video, the Meta CEO again blamed the mainstream media for censorship and tried to paint Meta as having pure motives.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. 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, especially in the US,” said Zuckerberg.
He then pointed fingers at the Biden administration, though he did not address who was forcing him to censor content while Trump was in office.
“That’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US 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.”
Zuckerberg also said the company would be taking some related measures like recommending political content to users because “it feels like we’re in a new era now.”
Meta’s censorship
Meta has been notorious for its censorship, which included suppressing the New York Post’s story about the Biden family’s corruption just before the 2020 election. It was later revealed that Meta has been working closely with the intelligence community and the Biden administration to censor content and users that challenge the government’s narratives. During COVID-19, for example, Facebook executives repeatedly approached the White House to ask for the government’s messaging, which they then enforced through censorship. Furthermore, any content about COVID-19 that fact-checkers declared “partly false” or “missing context," was treated by Facebook as completely false.
But “misinformation” is not the only reason social media companies censor content. Immediately after January 6th, 2021, for example, Meta suspended Trump from Facebook over concerns about “inciting violence.”
Now the tech mogul is working hard to court Trump after spending eight years sidelining him. Shortly after Zuckerberg met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late November, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. On Monday, Meta added UFC CEO Dana White, one of Trump’s closest allies, to its board of directors.
