The Real Reason for Zuckerberg’s Shift
Facebook’s reputation has taken a hit for censorship, and he wants to change that perception.
Mark Zuckerberg is the cofounder of Facebook and chairman and CEO of its parent company, Meta. In that position, he may be more responsible than any other individual for the systemic suppression of free speech in America today.
So forgive me if I don’t trust him when he apologizes — even multiple times — for that suppression, or when he acts as if he’s turning over a new leaf and abandoning politics.
The proof’s in the pudding, pal.
Stop censoring and suppressing the speech of The Patriot Post and countless other conservatives, and we’ll talk. Quit algorithmically hiding our content from our 746,000 followers — people who’ve said, “I want to see Patriot Post content” — and I’ll believe your change of heart.
The New York Times broke the news a couple of days ago with this headline: “Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics.” The subtitle adds, “He was once a backer of liberal causes. Then everyone seemed to turn on him. Now he wants to stay away from politics — if that’s possible.”
The story recounts Zuckerberg’s history of activism for various left-wing causes that the Times describes in the most benign terminology possible. It details how he grew disillusioned with that activism and the people pushing him into it because of its detrimental effects on his business.
He now says he wants to appear “neutral,” though the Times adds an interesting nugget: “Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now considers his personal politics to be more like libertarianism or ‘classical liberalism,’ according to people who have spoken to him recently.” It adds that he and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, have been appalled by the rise of anti-Semitism at Harvard, their alma mater.
Zuckerberg also had two phone calls with Donald Trump over the summer in what the Times says people interpret “as an attempt to repair a long-strained relationship between the two men.” After the first assassination attempt, Zuckerberg even expressed some admiration, saying, “Seeing Donald Trump get up after being shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Indeed it was.
He added, “On some level as an American, it’s, like, hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”
Don’t get me wrong, Zuckerberg’s ostensible change of heart is a welcome one. He even has the appropriate humility to know it will take a long time to repair broken trust. “I think it’s going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand is back to the place that it could have been,” Zuckerberg said recently, “if I hadn’t messed up in the first place.”
Here, it’s worth remembering how he messed it up. I believe that history starts all the way back in Genesis 3 with the one I’ve long argued was the first “fact-checker” — Satan.
“Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” the serpent asked Eve. She explained the prohibition, and he fact-checked her: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Satan twisted the truth, making it a lie, which is often what Leftmedia “fact-checkers” do.
So, how does that have anything to do with Zuckerberg? Well, a few years back, Zuckerberg followed the advice of his fellow left-wingers and installed the “independent third-party fact-checker” feature on Facebook. Those ostensibly neutral self-appointed arbiters of truth would become Zuckerberg’s gatekeepers of information. They would decide what could and could not be said on Facebook, and Zuckerberg could absolve himself under the fiction that he and his company weren’t the ones doing the censoring.
The dirty little secret was that Facebook was paying the fact-checkers. That belied their independence, of course, but it also motivated them. They would only be worth their money if they kept finding things to censor and suppress. Furthermore, these “fact-checkers” were and are almost universally left-wing hacks from Leftmedia outlets. They’ll check a few Democrat things now and then for the sake of pretense, but their bread and butter is disagreeing with the opinions of conservatives.
Another dirty secret still is that Facebook doesn’t always censor speech by removing the page of an “offender,” which would be clear and obvious. It most often suppresses content via algorithms based on “strikes” implemented by the “fact-checkers.” Our social media director, Andrew Culper, has detailed several instances of this on our page. Post the “wrong” thing, and fewer people will see your content. It’s censorship by shadow-banning, and you might not know it other than decreased interaction with your content.
Unless and until Zuckerberg embraces an Elon Musk-like devotion to free speech, there is no reason to trust him or his company. He can become apolitical all he wants, but if Facebook is still suppressing the free speech of anyone to the right of Karl Marx, then it’s nothing more than virtue signaling meant to shore up some problematic business trends.
