Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company is making six major changes to restore free speech to its Facebook social media platform.
“We’ve reached a point where there’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg admits in a Facebook video. “Complex systems make mistakes,” which has caused the undue removal of innocent posts, Zuckerberg explains.
But, Zuckerberg also attributes much of the unjust censorship to the influence of the Biden Administration and the legacy media:
“Government and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political.”
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“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.”
“But, the fact-checkers have just been too politically bias and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg says.
“The only way that we can push back on this global (censorship) trend is with the support of the U.S. government,” Zuckerberg says, noting the handcuffs placed on free speech during the Biden Administration:
“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.”
“But, now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it,” Zuckerberg says, listing six steps Facebook will now take to combat censorship:
- Get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X.com.
- Simply online policies and remove restrictions on topics, such as immigration and gender.
- Change enforcement policies, to focus on illegal and important violations to reduce the number of innocent people’s posts censored.
- Bring back civic content due to public desire to allow political viewpoints.
- Move Facebook’s trust-and-safety and content moderation teams out of California and base U.S. content review in Texas.
- Work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
“The bottom line is that, after years of having our content moderation work process focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on removing mistakes, simplifying our systems and getting back to our roots about giving people voice,” Zuckerberg concludes.
“It took real guts” for Zuckerberg to admit that Facebook’s “fact-checkers” were unjustly censoring viewpoints – and to end the platform’s fact-check program – Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell said in a statement reacting to Zuckerberg’s announcement.
Bozell praised Zuckerberg for taking “a giant step toward helping to grow freedom everywhere” by promising to institute meaningful reforms that will address the rampant bias that MRC has exposed and documented.