What Meta’s announcements tell us about the evolving digital censorship environment

In a five minute video, Zuck concedes that his company has been heavy-handed in its approach to censorship but insists he was just doing what he was told by biased politicians, legacy media and fact-checking organisations. With the big-picture acuity you would expect of such a powerful man, he has sensed a changed in prevailing sentiment around digital censorship and, commendably, decided to adapt to it.

“It’s time to get back to our roots on free expression,” opens Zuck, apparently harking back to a time few other people can recall. But let’s take him at his word and accept that the censorious Facebook and Instagram of the last decade were aberrations. Why, when Zuck has near total control over those platforms, did he allow this to happen?

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” he continues. “A lot of this is clearly political.” And the nature of those politics soon becomes clear. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” says Zuck. Which begs the question of what has been prioritised previously. The clear inference is that the Biden US government was pro-censorship, an allegation supported by substantial evidence. As for what Meta’s previous priorities had been, that’s anyone’s guess, but a good place to start may be enshittification.

Concrete measures

To be fair to him, these are more than just empty platitudes issued in a desperate and belated attempt to adjust to changing cultural currents. Zuck goes on to detail a bunch of concrete measures that he claims will restore the libertarian utopia Facebook once was. “We’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes,” he says. “The fact checkers have just been too politically biased.”

There are so many problems with self-proclaimed fact checkers that it’s hard to know where to start. Leaving aside that very few supposed facts are absolute and nearly all are open to subjective interpretation, there’s the matter of funding. Meta is a significant funder of many of them, including Poynter which is ubiquitous in this field, so conflicts of interest abound. Of course they’re biased, who isn’t?

Hilariously, the NYT published a story in response with the following headline: “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.” If that’s not a perfect example of marking your own homework then we don’t know what is. The internet hasn’t disappointed in its response, but the story has served the useful function of perfectly encapsulating the absurdity of any claim to be the arbiter of truth.

Community notes is a sort of open-source fact checking system through which anyone can post a clarification of a published claim. It was one of the major changes introduced after Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) and, while many questions remain about how it works, it at least distributes fact checking responsibility.

Cancel culture

Zuck then seems to take aim at cancel culture. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” he says, as if he has only just noticed. Acknowledging automated filters are too crude a tool to allow for the free speech he now venerates, Zuck adds: “For lower severity violations we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.”

Can anyone else see the inherent contradiction between those two statements? On one hand Zuck laments the tendency of people to censor and exclude each other, but on the other he says he’s going to rely on those same people to grass each other up before taking action. The perverse incentive this creates is clear and he had better be ready for a resulting deluge of vexatious and vindictive reports.

“It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” warns Zuck, in assessing the consequences of this new laissez-faire regime. Here he gets to the essence of the censorship debate: the tension between safety and freedom. If we accept that an increase in one means a decrease in the other, then the only useful debate is over the optimal equilibrium of that equation.

A bit of politics

On the matter of political content, Zuck says: “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now.” It certainly does. Quite what form ‘the community’ took is unclear, so we’re going to assume there’s no such thing and he’s once more deflecting responsibly from himself and his senior team.

Anyway, we’re allowed to talk about politics again on Meta’s platforms, which is nice. This new era, of course, was defined last November when Donald Trump won the US presidential election. This put Zuck et al in a bit of a spot, since they have historically persecuted him and he’s not known for his conciliatory, forgiving nature. It seems Zuck has decide that his best chance of tempering Trump’s ire is to prostrate himself at his feet, a move calculated to appeal to Trump’s famously suggestible ego.

“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” concluded Zuck, saving the best for last. While Europe, Latin America and China were singled out as exemplars, the previous US government was once more denounced. Presumably US aggression towards TikTok and French persecution of Telegram are still fine, though.

And the Trump pandering didn’t even end there. leftist UK politician Nick Clegg is is no longer Meta’s head of global affairs, replaced by Joel Kaplan, who is apparently the company’s most prominent Republican. Close Trump ally Dana White, the head of MMA fighting organisation UFC, has been added to the Meta board, a move that provided an early test of its new commitment to free speech.

While fear of Trump’s wrath may well have been the principal reason for Meta’s censorship U-turn, Zuck is right to observe a broader shift in popular sentiment, of which Trump’s election is as much a symptom as a cause. The hysteria surrounding Trump’s previous presidency, followed by the pandemic and a Biden presidency keen on pandering to the worst excesses of its own activists, conspired to create a very oppressive public speech environment in the US and by extension the UK. Zuck seems to be betting that the tide is now retreating from that high water mark and all reasonable people must be hoping he’s right.

Overton Window moves

Some readers may not be familiar with the concept of the Overton Window, which is defined by Wikipedia as “the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” Perhaps Zuck was, as he wants us to believe, always uncomfortable with the position of the Overton Window over the past decade and is now gratefully embracing its new location.

There are other more pragmatic reasons for this change of heart, however. The new head of US comms regulator FCC is Brendan Carr, who values freedom of speech highly, so it’s wise for Meta to get ahead of his agenda. As touched on previously, there is significant popular resentment towards fact checkers, so Meta may once more be swimming with the current on this matter. The histrionic responses by their few remaining supporters only serve to further demonstrate how overdue this move is.

And then there are outright commercial considerations. Rival social media platform X moved in a free speech direction years ago and its owner is, at least for the time being, a close ally of Trump. It no longer makes competitive sense to cede that ground. Furthermore, the curiously unstated reason for much of the previous censorship was advertiser pressure. If the Overton Window has indeed shifted, maybe prudish ad dollars have followed.

Damascene conversion

So the provenance of this Damascene conversion is almost certainly pragmatism more than principle but, as free speech campaigner Andrew Doyle notes: “Does it matter if his reasons are cynical?” It is in the nature of business people to follow the money which, in turn, often follows culture and power. Whatever his reasons, this move has to be celebrated by those so seek greater freedom of speech.

As is so often the case, however, the devil is in the detail. Musk is an imperfect exponent of it himself and has recently made it his mission to demonstrate the downside of free speech with a semi-informed trolling crusade against the UK Prime Minister. But the best way to counter bad speech is with good speech, not censorship. Meta now has to live up to Zuck’s promises and it can be sure that Trump and Musk will be the first to speak up if it doesn’t.

Here's independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, on free speech video platform Rumble, offering good further analysis on the matter.