Social media giant Meta shocked the tech industry Tuesday by announcing the company will be taking steps to “restore free expression” on its social media platforms, including Facebook.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video statement, claiming his company tried to address these concerns without becoming “the arbiters of truth.”
He continued, “But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
As CBN News reported, Meta has thus decided to phase out fact-checkers and opt to use “more comprehensive community notes,” a system similar to what Elon Musk has implemented on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Jacob Huebert, president of Liberty Justice Center, a law firm that protects First Amendment rights, told CBN News he believes these sweeping changes follow a broad shift in politics and culture:
“It seems like we’re coming to the end of an era here as the Biden administration comes to a close,” he said. “The Biden administration — and even a little bit before that — was a period marked by heavy-handed governmental efforts to censor content on social media and social media companies being very compliant with the government when it pressured them to censor people on various topics.”
Huebert cited the suppression of stories surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop and social media chatter about COVID-19 and other pandemic-related responses as evidence of rampant censorship.
He said the Biden administration pressured Facebook and other companies to “censor content that went against the government’s narrative.”
Zuckerberg’s statement made it clear he believes his platforms have indeed participated in too much censorship, that he wants to right the ship, and that he plans to work with incoming President Donald Trump to crack down on free speech restrictions aimed by foreign governments at American companies.
Huebert said these changes come after Musk’s purchase of Twitter brought with it a slew of free speech improvements — something Facebook might now be looking to replicate.
“Instead of heavy censorship, we saw exposure of that censorship through Musk’s release of the Twitter files and other things that have come out in litigation against the social media companies,” he said. “Now, I think that the whole era of censorship is coming to an end.”
Huebert added that market pressure could be pushing in on Meta, as free speech is currently being heralded. Zuckerberg himself said in his announcement video that the election seemed to indicate there was a renewed focus on the importance of speech.
Huebert said the re-emergence of Trump could indeed be motivating Zuckerberg’s actions.
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“I think he also probably realizes that that government pressure to censor is going to go away,” he said. “It abated somewhat over the course of the Biden years, and now President Trump has a very different attitude toward freedom of speech online.”
Ultimately, the 2024 presidential election showed the public seems to be more in line with Trump on First Amendment issues, according to Huebert. This gives a further push to Zuckerberg to change course.
“The demand for free speech has been shown both in the market and in the election, where people voted for the candidate who presented himself as the free speech candidate,” he said. “And, so, I think that primarily is what accounts for the change.”
Read more about Facebook’s changes here.
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