Unless you’ve been living on the moon or under a rock, you probably know that on Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major change in the company’s policy around free speech and fact-checking. Wearing his new uniform of curly hair and a gold neck chain (and a $900,000 watch) to address his subjects… er, users, Zuck described the changes as a restoration of “free expression” on the company’s platforms and a return to Facebook’s free-speech roots, but what it boils down to is the removal of almost all the guardrails that Meta has erected over the past few years around hate speech and misinformation, ever since the company came under fire during the 2016 election (Kevin Roose also noted in the NYT that when it comes to roots, Facebook “was inspired by a hot-or-not website for Harvard students, not a Cato Institute white paper”).
As Wired pointed out in the wake of the news, if you want to go on Facebook or Instagram and say that someone who is trans or gay is mentally ill, you are totally free to do so now. Could you say “f u, retard,” as Elon Musk did to someone on his platform this week? I haven’t checked, but I assume that you could. Now that’s what I call freedom! Of course the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which specializes in disinformation, says that the changes could embolden authoritarian regimes and put Meta’s own users at risk, but hey — the price of freedom, right?
Zuckerberg and Meta’s newly appointed head of global affairs, Joel Kaplan—a former chief of staff under George W. Bush — said they are shutting down the company’s fact-checking program, which was launched in 2016 and at its peak involved dozens of media partners. Instead, Zuckerberg said Facebook and Instagram would implement a community approach similar to X’s “Community Notes” program, which crowdsources corrections from users (and has been criticized for moving too slowly and having little impact). The company also said that its content-moderation teams will be moving to Texas from California, in order to remove any concerns that “biased employees are overly censoring content.” (But aren’t there biased people in Texas who might also do this? Pipe down in the back now — the adults are talking.)
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The good, the bad, and the ugly
Both Zuckerberg and Kaplan put a “isn’t free speech wonderful” spin on the news. Kaplan said in a blog post on Facebook that the company will allow for more speech by lifting restrictions on “some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” such as gender and immigration — coincidentally, two of the topics that tend to see the most hateful kinds of speech and harassment — but that the company would continue to crack down on “illegal and high-severity violations” like terrorism and child trafficking. Meta’s platforms, Kaplan wrote, are built to be places where people can express themselves freely, and a platform where “all the good, bad and ugly is on display” is how free expression works. In his video address, Zuckerberg said (transcript courtesy of Tech Policy Press):
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. So, over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system. Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.
The restrictions on immigration and gender were “out of touch with mainstream discourse,” according to Zuckerberg, and were used to “shut out people with different ideas.” So people who think that trans people don’t deserve to exist, for example, are just people with “different ideas” that are more “in touch with mainstream discourse” presumably. Zuckerberg also explicitly called what the company’s automated filters have been doing in removing such commentary “censorship,” which (like this earlier reference to removing COVID-19 related information during the pandemic) is a clear shout out to conservatives like Trump and his followers, who insist on believing that right-wing commentary is censored on social platforms because the liberal left is in charge of everything, despite a consistent lack of any evidence that this happens.
In talking about the fact-checking program, Kaplan said that the intention was to have “experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so [users] were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.” But that’s not how it played out, he wrote (something that seemed to come as a shock to members of the program, according to Wired). Instead, Kaplan says that the “biases and perspectives” of the experts doing the fact-checking started to distort the choices being 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,” he says, and the program “became a tool to censor.”
Time to dismantle the Potemkin village
If you are looking for context on this move, there are lots of places to go, since literally everyone with a blog or a website or a BlueSky account probably wrote about it. For me, Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter has the most concise overview: In a nutshell, the Trump election in 2016 led to rampant criticism that Facebook had been used by Russian assets and by regular political operatives to sow disinformation and discord and help elect Trump. Chastened by this, and hoping to forestall regulation, Zuckerberg hired 40,000 moderators, tightened the rules on speech, down-ranked misinformation and set up the Facebook Oversight Board, a kind of spineless Supreme Court that is allegedly arms-length from Meta and was staffed by former diplomats and academics (presumably it isn’t long for this world either, although it is easy to ignore).
Zuckerberg probably thought that these moves would help him and his company stave off not just government intervention but PR black eyes — unfortunately for him it did nothing of the sort. And with Trump once again in ascendance, it became brutally obvious that Meta was on the wrong side of (recent) history, at least in realistic terms (The Verge also noted that the incoming head of the FCC threatened Meta over its fact-checking operation, which he called a “censorship cartel”). Now, all of those moves are being unwound, just as Meta has dismantled the Facebook Journalism Project and its much-hyped $300-million handout program for the media. In other words, time to take down the Potemkin village false fronts and empty shells of buildings.
Ben Thompson, who writes a technology-analysis newsletter called Stratechery, has a somewhat different perspective on these recent decisions — he argues that while there is clearly a political gambit here, the way Meta is approaching speech under these new rules is much closer to the way Zuckerberg really feels, as opposed to the way he pretended to feel when he was erecting all those barricades and guardrails. Thompson writes that he suspects “the situation is a bit more nuanced than it is being presented, just because Zuckerberg’s odyssey in terms of a commitment to free expression has been more nuanced than the popular narrative — particularly on the right — has been.” Thompson notes that Zuckerberg’s first response to the suggestion that fake news on Facebook influenced the election was that it was a “pretty crazy idea.”
Mmmmmm… cake
As Thompson and others have also pointed out, Zuckerberg gave us a glimpse of his real feelings about speech in an address at Georgetown University in 2019 (it was also published in the Wall Street Journal). In that speech, he said:
Frederick Douglass once called free expression “the great moral renovator of society.” Movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo depend on people openly sharing their experiences. And the ability to speak freely has been central in the global fight for democracy. Allowing greater numbers of people to share their perspectives is how society becomes more inclusive. But increasingly, this idea is being challenged. Some believe that free expression is driving us apart rather than bringing us together. Others from across the political spectrum believe that achieving their preferred political outcome is more important than allowing every person to have a voice. I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy.
As I wrote at the time, the speech seemed like a case of Zuckerberg wanting to eat his cake and have it too. In other words, taking down free speech is bad, but Facebook should be free to decide what is wrong or dangerous and take that down with impunity — or leave it up and be complicit in what the UN called a genocide in Myanmar. Jillian York, international director of freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the Facebook CEO’s speech “23 minutes of contradictions, unsubstantiated postulations, and a Cliff Notes version of free speech history.” Zuckerberg’s invocation of freedom fighter Frederick Douglass also likely came as a shock to many of the marginalized groups that have either been censored by the social network or harassed and victimized by those who use it. Zuckerberg said that we can stand for free expression or decide “the cost is simply too great.” But the cost for whom? For white billionaires?
Thompson spent much of his newsletter response to Meta’s recent moves defending the removal of most of the guardrails on speech, agreeing with Zuckerberg that some of those decisions veered too far towards censorship, especially with respect to COVID-19 (Zuckerberg said recently that he regretted many of these decisions, and that he was pressured by the Biden government). I am far closer to being a free-speech absolutist than I am to a protectionist, and I’m willing to admit that banning accounts for mentioning the possibility of a lab leak was probably an overstep. But we were in a pandemic! One whose true scope was unknown at the time, but would ultimately kill tens of millions of people. So maybe it was okay that we erred on the side of not recommending everyone take horse de-worming medicine instead of the RNA vaccine.
We are done here
Ellen Goodman, co-founder of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law, told me in 2019 that Zuckerberg isn’t the first to have to struggle with tensions between free speech and democratic discourse, but added that he is “confronting these questions without any connection to press traditions, with only recent acknowledgment that he runs a media company [and] in the absence of any regulation,” which makes Meta’s decisions orders of magnitude more important. Evelyn Douek, then a doctoral student at Harvard Law School, said that most of Zuckerberg’s statements about his commitment to free speech in that Georgetown address were based on the old idea of a marketplace of ideas being the best path to truth, which she said “makes no sense at all in a world where Facebook constructs, tilts [and] distorts the marketplace with its algorithms.”
But for me at least, the real key to Meta’s recent decisions around speech was revealed last year in some comments that Zuckerberg made on a podcast, when he said that he was “done apologizing.” Here’s how TechCrunch describes it:
When reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control. “Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
I think this gets to the root of Zuckerberg’s recent retrenchment on speech. Yes, it may be closer to the way he really feels about restrictions on speech and censorship, and yes, it is also a realistic admission that Trump and the MAGA crowd are in control and he should adjust his company’s behavior. But on a personal level, I think he is also sick and tired of having to apologize or feel bad for the bad things that Facebook does. After all, he’s a good person, and so the thing that he built — a globe-spanning colossus larger than several Western nations and worth trillions of dollars in value — must also be fundamentally good, right? Of course, mistakes happen and maybe there’s a genocide, or someone says the wrong thing and people kill themselves, but hey, that’s just the price we pay for free speech and connecting the world, right?