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Censorship Industrial Complex

AboutFacebook: Zuckerberg zaps fact checkers in favour free speech

Published

12 months ago

9 minute read

It is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems and getting back to our roots about giving people a voice.

Mark Zuckerberg surprised the planet today with the release of a 5 minute video detailing a 5 point plan to pave the way for more free expression on Facebook.

Zuckerberg says his goal has always been to “give people a voice”, but governments and legacy media have been pushing Facebook towards censorship.  Now Facebook is going to concentrate on censoring illegal issues, and back off on punishing speech.

The five part plan includes:

  1. Getting rid of fact checkers in favour of ‘X’ style “Community Notes”
  2. Simplifying content policies to get rid of restrictions around topics like immigration and gender.
  3. Focus filters on tackling illegal and ‘high severity violations’ instead of low severity violations.
  4. Bringing back ‘Civic Content’, so more ‘political’ content will be seen.
  5. Facebook will move Content Moderation Teams from California to Texas to help erase the ‘bias of our teams’ and work with Donald Trump’s government to help promote free speech around the world.

From Mark Zuckerberg Facebook

It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression. We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes. Looking forward to this next chapter.

Zuckerberg’s full comments:

Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years. There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content.

Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, Child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.

But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts. That’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do.

First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to acts starting in the US. 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 note 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. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.

Third, we’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations and for lower severity violations. We’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a tradeoff. 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.

Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asks to see less politics because there’s making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

Fifth, we’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more.

The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censor apps from even working in the country.

The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship by going after US and other American companies. It has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it. It’ll take time to get this right. And these are complex systems. They’re never going to be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.

But the bottom line is that after. For years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content. It is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems and getting back to our roots about giving people a voice. I’m looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there. And more to come soon

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After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

US Slams UK and EU Over Online Speech Regulation, Announces Release of Files on Past Censorship Efforts

Published on December 27, 2025

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By Cindy Harper

Sarah Rogers’ comments draw a new line in the sand between America’s First Amendment and Europe’s tightening grip on online speech.

Speaking during an appearance on The Liz Truss Show, Rogers said Washington intends to respond to the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom after it sought to bring the website 4chan under its jurisdiction.
She said the situation “forced” the US to defend its constitutional protections, warning that “when British regulators decree that British law applies to American speech on American sites on American soil with no connection to Britain,” the matter can no longer be ignored.
Rogers called it “a perverse blessing” that the dispute is forcing a renewed transatlantic conversation about free expression, observing that “Britain and America did develop the free speech tradition together.”
Rogers announced that the State Department will soon publish a collection of previously unreleased internal emails and documents describing earlier US government involvement in social media moderation efforts.
The release is part of what she termed a “truth and reconciliation initiative” that will include material linked to the now-defunct Global Engagement Center, which she said had coordinated with outside organizations to identify content for takedown.
That operation was “immediately dismantled” after she assumed her current post.
She argued that foreign governments have moved from cooperation to coercion in their dealings with US companies. “Europe and the UK and other governments abroad are…trying to nullify the American First Amendment by enforcing against American companies and American speakers and American soil,” Rogers said, referring to the EU’s fine against X and Ofcom’s recent enforcement campaigns.
On domestic policy, she criticized the UK’s Online Safety Act, saying that it is being sold as child protection legislation but in practice functions as a speech control measure.
“These statutes are just censoring adult political speech is not the best way to protect kids and it’s probably the worst way,” she said.
Rogers noted that under such laws, even parliamentary remarks about criminal networks could be censored if regulators deem them harmful.
Turning to Ofcom’s ongoing 4chan case, Rogers said its legal position effectively claims authority over purely American websites.
She offered a hypothetical: “I could go set up a website in my garage…about American political controversies…and Ofcom’s legal position nonetheless is that if I run afoul of British content laws, then I have to pay money for the British government.”
Rogers said she expects the US government to issue a response soon.
Throughout the interview, Rogers framed the current wave of global online regulation as an effort to suppress what she called “chaotic speech” that emerges with every major communications shift.
“People panic and they want to shove that innovation back in the bottle,” she said, warning that such attempts have “never worked.”
Her remarks mark one of the strongest rebukes yet from a senior American official toward the growing European model of compelled content moderation.
Rogers suggested that this model not only undermines open debate but also sets a precedent for governments worldwide to police political speech beyond their borders.
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Censorship Industrial Complex

Canadian university censors free speech advocate who spoke out against Indigenous ‘mass grave’ hoax

Published on December 23, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Dr. Frances Widdowson was arrested and given a ticket at the University of Victoria campus after trying to engage in conversation about ‘the disputed claims of unmarked graves in Kamloops.’

A Canadian academic who spoke out against claims there are mass unmarked graves of kids on former Indigenous residential schools, and who was arrested on a university campus as a result for trespassing, is fighting back with the help of a top constitutional group.

Dr. Frances Widdowson was arrested and given a ticket on December 2, 2025, at the University of Victoria (UVic) campus after trying to engage in conversation about “the disputed claims of unmarked graves in Kamloops,” noted the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) in a recent news release.

According to the JCCF, Widdowson was trying to initiate a “good faith” conversation with people on campus, along with the leader of OneBC provincial party, Dallas Brodi.

“My arrest at the University of Victoria is an indication of an institution that is completely unmoored from its academic purpose,” said Widdowson in a statement made available to LifeSiteNews.

She added that the “institution” has been “perpetuating the falsehood” of the remains of 215 children “being confirmed at Kamloops since 2021, and is intent on censoring any correction of this claim.”

“This should be of concern for everyone who believes that universities should be places of open inquiry and critical thinking, not propaganda and indoctrination,” she added.

UVic had the day before Widdowson’s arrest warned on its website that those in favor of free speech were “not permitted to attend UVic property for the purpose of speaking publicly.”

Despite the warning, Widdowson, when she came to campus, was met with some “100 aggressive protesters assembled where she intended to speak at Petch Fountain,” noted the JCCF.

The protesters consisted of self-identified Communists, along with Antifa-aligned people and Hamas supporters.

“When she declined to leave, she was arrested, detained for about two hours, and charged under British Columbia’s Trespass Act—an offence punishable by fines up to $2,000 or up to six months’ imprisonment,” said the JCCF.

According to Constitutional lawyer Glenn Blackett, UVic actions are shameful, as it “receives hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars annually while it facilitates the arrest of Canadians attempting to engage in free inquiry on campus.”

Widdowson’s legal team, with the help of the JCCF, will be defending her ticket to protect her “Charter-protected freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly.”

Widdowson served as a tenured professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, before she was fired over criticism of her views on identity politics and Indigenous policy, notes the JCCF. She was vindicated, however, as an arbitrator later found her termination was wrongful.

In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is, after four years, there have been no mass graves discovered at residential schools.

However, as the claims went unfounded, over 120 churches, most of them Catholic and many of them on Indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada since the spring of 2021.

Last year, retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht said Canadians are being “deliberately deceived by their own government” after blasting the former Trudeau government for “actively pursuing” a policy that blames the Catholic Church for the unfounded “deaths and secret burials” of Indigenous children.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, new private members’ Bill C-254, “An Act To Amend The Criminal Code” introduced by New Democrat MP Leah Gazan, looks to give jail time to people who engage in so-called “Denialism.” The bill would look to jail those who question the media and government narrative surrounding Canada’s “Indian Residential School system” that there are mass graves despite no evidence to support this claim.

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