It was only weeks ago that a congressional report confirmed that the censorship schemes assembled and implemented by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, working with social media platforms, were “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, already had admitted in a letter to Congress that he was censoring Americans on the orders of Biden.
In fact, he charged, “Senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor COVID-19 content, including humor & satire. … I believe the government pressure was wrong & I regret we were not more outspoken about it.”
Now Facebook is putting action behind Zuckerberg’s words, a video from Zuckerberg in which he promises to return to a constitutional standard.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. 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 announced.
Fox News reported the chief global affairs officer for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, Joel Kaplan, joined its “Fox & Friends” broadcast.
He said, “This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression. As Mark says in that video, what we’re doing is we’re getting back to our roots and free expression.”
Zuckerberg’s “fact-checking,” which often amounted to nothing more than a censorship of any opinion – or even fact – that disagreed with the agenda of American Democrats and other leftists on topics like COVID, elections and more, was installed in 2016 after the election and purportedly was to “manage” misinformation.
Executives said it was because of leftist political pressure to address what Democrats called misinformation, disinformation and malinformation, which even they admitted was true, but used in a way they didn’t like.
“We went to independent, third-party fact-checkers,” Kaplan told Fox News Digital. “It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform.”
The censorship, he confirmed, is being ended “completely,” and in its place with be a “community notes” plan similar to what Elon Musk installed on Twitter, now X, when he took it over.
“Instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read,” Kaplan said. “We think that’s a much better approach rather than relying on so-called experts who bring their own biases into the program.”
President-elect Donald Trump has had repeated run-ins with social media companies’ censorship his comments and opinions, and he’s even been removed from some, following their adherence to the Biden censorship agenda. In response he created Truth Social.
But as he’s taking over the White House in just days the political winds have shifted.
“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression,” Kaplan said.
“Kaplan also told Fox News Digital that Meta is changing some of its own content moderation rules, especially those that they feel are ‘too restrictive and not allowing enough discourse around sensitive topics like immigration, trans issues and gender,'” Fox reported.
“We want to make sure that discourse can happen freely on the platform without fear of censorship. We have the power to change the rules and make them more supportive of free expression. And we’re not just changing the rules, we are actually changing how we enforce the rules,” Kaplan explained.
Those changes will hit at operations for Facebook, Instagram and Meta.
Illegal activities, child sexual exploitation, terrorism and drugs, will continue to be censored, he said.
The congressional report last month said across its 17,000 pages that, “Freedom of speech, including free speech on digital platforms, is a fundamental and vital part of democratic societies. The ability of Americans to publish, share, and receive information and opinions online is necessary to an informed citizenry and the functioning of American democracy.”
But what it found, under the Biden-Harris regime, is that “the executive branch coerced or colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech.”
It explained, “Through its oversight, the Select Subcommittee revealed the extent of the censorship industrial complex, proving that in 2021 the Biden-Harris White House ‘engaged in a covert scheme of censorship’ that was ‘blatantly unconstitutional’ by directly pressuring Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon to censor COVID-related speech, including true information and critics of the Biden-Harris Administration.”
The report on the “Weaponization of the federal government” was released by the select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, in the committee on the Judiciary in the House.
In fact, the FBI’s interference in the 2020 election long as been known, and recognized as an undue influence on those results, as it told media organizations to suppress accurate information about Biden family scandals detailed in Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. A survey suggested that maneuver by the government could have cost Donald Trump the election in 2020.
The report, which includes hundreds of pages of direct testimony on the problem, explained the subcommittee found “how the Biden-Harris White House coerced social media platforms to censor Americans’ speech, including true information and speech criticizing the Biden-Harris administration.”
The FBI, the report charged, “directed social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online, including a verified U.S. State Department account and accounts belonging to American journalists.”
