From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

In a surprise early morning post, Mark Zuckerberg took to Instagram to announce that Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – will be taking steps to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” while seemingly placing a large share of the blame for past extreme censorship measures on pressure from the Biden administration and legacy media.

“The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” noted Zuckerberg, who met with president-elect Donald Trump shortly after his decisive election victory.  

Zuckerberg said that while he started building social media “to give people a voice,” “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” 

“A lot of this is clearly political,” he noted.  

He explained that Meta’s complex systems for guarding against harmful content such as drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation have been prone to make mistakes: “It’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship.” 

Following X/Twitter’s lead, Meta platforms will replace “fact-checkers” with “community notes.”

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” said Zuckerberg, but Meta’s fact checkers have been “too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” 

Meta will also move its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and its U.S.-based content review will soon be based in Texas.  

“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,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s gone too far.” 

‘It feels like a new era now’ 

“We’re bringing back civic content,” said Zuckerberg. “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, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.” 

“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,” said the social media titan.  

“The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world,” but other countries continue to exert substantial force to limit free speech on the internet. 

Zuckerberg explained: 

• 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 censored our 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 U.S. government,” he insisted. “And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.”  

“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” he continued. “But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.”  

‘Humility’ to now play a role in Meta’s management of its platforms 

In his 2019 speech at Georgetown University that portended social media’s crackdown on free speech, especially those expressing thoughts at odds with woke ideology, Zuckerberg claimed, “Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that’s dangerous.”  

The changes that were announced by Zuckerberg this morning are an attempt to return to the commitment to free expression he set out in his Georgetown speech, according to Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer.  

“That means being vigilant about the impact our policies and systems are having on people’s ability to make their voices heard, and having the humility to change our approach when we know we’re getting things wrong.” 

However, Facebook has long faced criticism for its harsh censorship regime, including for deplatforming conservative users and censoring speech critical of COVID mandates and the LGBT agenda, in addition to facilitating child sex trafficking. 

In 2020, Zuckerberg spent more than $400 million to influence the presidential race that year, which election integrity advocates have credited with likely handing the White House to Joe Biden. 

X/Twitter and Facebook headed in opposite directions? 

Just as Mark Zuckerberg announced a new era of free speech on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Elon Musk and his social media giant, X (formerly Twitter) seemed to be headed in the opposite direction, toward increased censorship and suppression.

Musk and X were slammed on X over the weekend after new restrictions and punitive measures were revealed for posts critical of X, those that are deemed to be too negative, and even those that “critique or challenge other users or public figures in a way that’s perceived as harsh or personal rather than constructive.”