Meta Must Do More Than Promise Free Speech
In a major announcement, the company says it will ditch the “fact-checkers” and other censorship methods.
Time will tell, but Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — just announced what might be and remain the biggest news of 2025. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video accompanying the Big Tech giant’s statement, “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms [emphasis added].”
How will this miracle happen? In part by dumping the “fact-check” façade. Zuckerberg said, “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.” That’s a telling admission of censorship, but more than that, Zuckerberg and Meta also suddenly sound like stalwarts for free speech. I almost cheered numerous times while watching his video. I’ll get to specifics in a moment.
First, however, given Facebook’s oppressive censorship over the past four and a half years, we’ll believe any promises about change when we see proof. As Mark Alexander put it, “Leftists never willingly give up power and control. Call me a skeptic.”
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— Andrew Culper | Patriot Post (@AndrewCulperTPP) January 7, 2025
I am tempted to rejoice at this news. But the reality is, Meta has run roughshod on the First Amendment for YEARS and has caused untold irreparable harm to millions and millions of people.
This may be a step in the right direction, but it will take…
Moreover, this needs far more than just an “Oops, my bad” from Zuck. We’d like to know what Meta will be doing to atone for the last four-plus years of criminal assault on the First Amendment and the American people.
Beginning in roughly June 2020, Big Tech and the Leftmedia united with the Democrat Party to oust President Donald Trump in favor of the decrepit and unfit Joe Biden. They rigged the election by aggressively censoring, suppressing, and silencing conservative speech on social media.
Since then, our Patriot Post team has endured repeated and obnoxious “fact-checks” of our content on Facebook. Almost without exception, these are tendentious and mendacious misinterpretations of what we said. (A few examples are here, here, here, and here.)
It would be frustrating enough if we just had to contend with bad-faith arguments against our analysis or, especially, our memes, but those “fact-checks” were the mechanism used to mercilessly suppress our reach. Few of our Facebook followers were permitted by the site’s algorithms to see our content, which they had chosen to follow. Our follower count surpassed 750,000 before abruptly stalling and even receding in recent months. Traffic to our website from Facebook fell off a cliff beginning in June 2020 and has never recovered.
There’s no telling how much this has cost us in reach and dollars raised. We have considered legal options, albeit without success because Facebook’s Section 230 protections are so unfair and unjust.
You might be able to discern that this subject makes me rather angry. Indeed, few things boil my blood like the “fact-checking” arbiters of truth. They are a brood of lying vipers whose mission is to stop me, my team, and anyone else guilty of conservative thoughtcrime from voicing opinions contrary to the Left’s Narrative. They are unAmerican, Orwellian, and fascist thugs.
Given all that, it’s hard to overestimate how critical Meta’s announced changes could be for your team here at The Patriot Post and for free speech nationwide.
Now, let’s look at what Meta and Zuckerberg said in the announcement.
In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.
We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.
The statement described the origin of the “independent fact checking program,” which was never truly independent or based on facts. Instead, it was turning over the keys to “experts” who Meta now admits “have their own biases and perspectives.”
Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.
You don’t say.
On X, the new model for Facebook, posts are allowed to stand, and they are sometimes appended with rebuttal or context added from readers. This allows more free speech, not less.
We plan to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year. As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it.
The least tolerant people on the planet are members of the gender and genital cult — what we often call the Rainbow Mafia. Many of our posts that received “fact-checks,” “hate strikes,” or other suppression methods dealt with gender issues, such as saying true things like there are only two genders and that transing the kids is child abuse.
Meta now says these intolerant folks will have less power. “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like … gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” the statement says. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”
Meta admitted that its façade of an appeal process was often “frustratingly slow and [didn’t] always get to the right outcome.” Our Andrew Culper can attest to that. It also promised to allow “civic content” — i.e., “posts about elections, politics or social issues” — to receive more fair treatment in the algorithm.
Ultimately, “These changes are an attempt to return to the commitment to free expression.”
Again, we’ll believe it when we see it, but this could be seismic. And none of it would have happened without the defeat of Kamala Harris and the election of Donald Trump. “Recent elections,” Zuckerberg noted, “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” The company sucked up to Trump with a big inaugural donation. It also just added Trump fan Dana White to its board and will replace Nick Clegg, the left-winger head of its global policy team, with his deputy, Joel Kaplan, a vocal Republican.
Before that, though, what moved the needle was Elon Musk’s purchase and transformation of Twitter. We may look back at that moment as the watershed for free speech.
“Over the past four years,” Zuckerberg complained, “even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.” He’s said this before — and it has been proven. He’s also apologized numerous times for speech suppression. Yet, for years, he has led the company most guilty of this suppression. We’d love nothing more than for this to be him turning over a new leaf, but it’ll take time to prove this is more than a superficial makeover.
All the same, I can’t help but feel that, over the past few months, an enormous weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Maybe — just maybe — America is at the beginning of new and great things.
