Censorship Industrial Complex
Facebook to get rid of fact checkers and promote free speech
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:
- Getting rid of fact checkers in favour of ‘X’ style “Community Notes”
- Simplifying content policies to get rid of restrictions around topics like immigration and gender.
- Focus filters on tackling illegal and ‘high severity violations’ instead of low severity violations.
- Bringing back ‘Civic Content’, so more ‘political’ content will be seen.
- 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
Business
Telegram founder Pavel Durov exposes crackdown on digital privacy in Tucker Carlson interview
From LifeSiteNews
By Robert Jones
Durov, who was detained in France in 2024, believes governments are seeking to dismantle personal freedoms.
Tucker Carlson has interviewed Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who remains under judicial restrictions in France nearly a year after a surprise arrest left him in solitary confinement for four days — without contact with his family, legal clarity, or access to his phone.
Durov, a Russian-born tech executive now based in Dubai, had arrived in Paris for a short tourist visit. Upon landing, he was arrested and accused of complicity in crimes committed by Telegram users — despite no evidence of personal wrongdoing and no prior contact from French authorities on the matter.
In the interview, Durov said Telegram has always complied with valid legal requests for IP addresses and other data, but that France never submitted any such requests — unlike other EU states.
Telegram has surpassed a billion users and over $500 million in profit without selling user data, and has notably refused to create government “backdoors” to its encryption. That refusal, Durov believes, may have triggered the incident.
READ: Arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov signals an increasing threat to digital freedom
French prosecutors issued public statements, an unusual move, at the time of his arrest, fueling speculation that the move was meant to send a message.
At present, Durov remains under “judicial supervision,” which limits his movement and business operations.
Carlson noted the irony of Durov’s situating by calling to mind that he was not arrested by Russian President Vladimir Putin but rather a Western democracy.
Former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has said that Durov should have stayed in Russia, and that he was mistaken in thinking that he would not have to cooperate with foreign security services.
Durov told Carlson that mandates for encryption “backdoors” endanger all users, not just suspects. Once created, such tools inevitably become accessible to hackers, foreign agents, and hostile regimes.
“In the US,” he commented, “you have a process that allows the government to actually force any engineer in any tech company to implement a backdoor and not tell anyone about it.”
READ: Does anyone believe Emmanuel Macron’s claim that Pavel Durov’s arrest was not political?
Durov also pointed to a recent French bill — which was ultimately defeated in the National Assembly — that would have required platforms to break encryptions on demand. A similar EU proposal is now under discussion, he noted.
Despite the persecution, Durov remains committed to Telegram’s model. “We monetize in ways that are consistent with our values,” he told Carlson. “We monetized without violating privacy.”
There is no clear timeline for a resolution of Durov’s case, which has raised serious questions about digital privacy, online freedom, and the limits of compliance for tech companies in the 21st century.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Alberta senator wants to revive lapsed Trudeau internet censorship bill
From LifeSiteNews
Senator Kristopher Wells and other senators are ‘interested’ in reviving the controversial Online Harms Act legislation that was abandoned after the election call.
A recent Trudeau-appointed Canadian senator said that he and other “interested senators” want the current Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney to revive a controversial Trudeau-era internet censorship bill that lapsed.
Kristopher Wells, appointed by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last year as a senator from Alberta, made the comments about reviving an internet censorship bill recently in the Senate.
“In the last Parliament, the government proposed important changes to the Criminal Code of Canada designed to strengthen penalties for hate crime offences,” he said of Bill C-63 that lapsed earlier this year after the federal election was called.
Bill C-63, or the Online Harms Act, was put forth under the guise of protecting children from exploitation online.
While protecting children is indeed a duty of the state, the bill included several measures that targeted vaguely defined “hate speech” infractions involving race, gender, and religion, among other categories. The proposal was thus blasted by many legal experts.
The Online Harms Act would have in essence censored legal internet content that the government thought “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group.” It would be up to the Canadian Human Rights Commission to investigate complaints.
Wells said that “Bill C-63 did not come to a vote in the other place and in the dying days of the last Parliament the government signaled it would be prioritizing other aspects of the bill.”
“I believe Canada must get tougher on hate and send a clear and unequivocal message that hate and extremism will never be tolerated in this country no matter who it targets,” he said.
Carney, as reported by LifeSiteNews, vowed to continue in Trudeau’s footsteps, promising even more legislation to crack down on lawful internet content.
Before the April 28 election call, the Liberals were pushing Bill C-63.
Wells asked if the current Carney government remains “committed to tabling legislation that will amend the Criminal Code as proposed in the previous Bill C-63 and will it commit to working with interested senators and community stakeholders to make the changes needed to ensure this important legislation is passed?”
Seasoned Senator Marc Gold replied that he is not in “a position to speculate” on whether a new bill would be brought forward.
Before Bill C-63, a similar law, Bill C-36, lapsed in 2021 due to that year’s general election.
As noted by LifeSiteNews, Wells has in the past advocated for closing Christian schools that refuse to violate their religious principles by accepting so-called Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs and spearheaded so-called “conversion therapy bans.”
Other internet censorship bills that have become law have yet to be fully implemented.
Last month, LifeSiteNews reported that former Minister of Environment Steven Guilbeault, known for his radical climate views, will be the person in charge of implementing Bill C-11, a controversial bill passed in 2023 that aims to censor legal internet content in Canada.
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