This week, in a stunning volte-face, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be revising its censorship policies to accord with his older vision of free speech. Specifically, Zuckerberg committed Facebook to revising a series of standards: reliance on left-wing fact-checkers will end, replaced by an X-like community notes system in which fact-checking will be crowdsourced; political content will no longer be artificially muted; censorship will be ended around controversial issues like transgender ideology and immigration; the content moderation team will be shifted from California to Texas to better account for the varying views of Americans; and Facebook will work with the Trump administration to push American-style free speech standards around the world.
This is all happening for one reason: the reelection of Donald Trump.
While Democrats claimed for years that Trump represented tyranny, the truth is that it was the Democratic Party and its media apparatchiks that routinely used the tools of power to silence their opposition in authoritarian ways. The cudgeling of Facebook represents a perfect example of such quiet authoritarianism.
Before the 2016 election, Facebook was considered a darling of the left: an open platform that could be used by heretofore underrepresented people to spread their political messages. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign met with high praise for its creative use of Facebook, for example. The same held true for the Arab Spring.
And then Donald Trump won.
Democrats and the legacy media decided that social media had to be clubbed into place. Alternative media outlets like my own company, The Daily Wire, were far too successful: Democrats were upset that conservative content was reaching a wide audience, and legacy media were upset at the competition. And so by early 2017, the Democrat-Media Human Centipede set its narrative: that only the perversity of social media – and its hijacking by evil Russian masterminds – had allowed the election of Donald Trump.
By 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was openly threatening Facebook with governmental action if the social media company refused to crack down on speech Democrats didn’t like.
In 2019, Zuckerberg himself responded in an excellent speech at Georgetown University, pledging his company to free speech: “We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”
But then, in 2020, Facebook began to cave under pressure from the federal government on issues ranging from COVID coverage to the Hunter Biden laptop story. By 2021, the Biden White House was openly lobbying Facebook to change its standards to downgrade the traffic of the Daily Wire, among others. That same year, in April, our traffic began to plummet. Overall, our reach dropped by 90%.
Facebook got comfortable with censorship; Zuckerberg has admitted as much. The Biden administration, Zuckerberg claims, pushed for censorship. And Facebook conceded.
Not anymore. As Zuckerberg explained this week, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.” That is absolutely correct. And it is also a damning indictment of a Democratic Party that always values power above principle. Free speech has become a Republican principle because Democrats abandoned it. And now free speech is returning. Let’s hope that remains a permanent feature of the social media landscape, not merely a temporary move to buy off the resurgent Trump administration.
