Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that Facebook would become revising its censorship policies in a beautiful volte-face in keeping with his more recent vision of free conversation. Social especially pledged to revise a number of standards, including those that apply to the left-wing fact-checkers, replacing them with an X-like group notes system, ending repression of content on sensitive topics like transgender ideology and immigration, shifting the glad moderating team from California to Texas, and working with the Trump administration to promote American-style free speech standards around the world.
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This is all happening for one reason: the election of Donald Trump.
The Democratic Party and its advertising functionaries frequently used the equipment of energy to silence their antagonism in authoritarian ways, despite decades of claims that Trump represented dictatorship. For peaceful authoritarianism is perfectly exemplified by Facebook’s sluggish behavior.
Before the 2016 election, Facebook was seen as a left-leaning program that could be used by previously represented people to distribute their social messages. Barack Obama’s 2012 plan met with great reward for its innovative use of Facebook, for example. The Arab Spring also benefited from this.  ,
And then Donald Trump won.
Democrats and the established media made the decision to integrate social media. Alternative media outlets like my own company, The Daily Wire, were far too successful: Democrats were upset that conservative content was reaching a wide audience, and legacy media were upset at the competition. By early 2017, the Democrat-Media Human Centipede had established its thesis that Donald Trump’s election was possible only due to the perversity of social media and its hijacking by evil Russian masterminds.
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein had already threatened Facebook with governmental action in 2017 if the social media giant refused to restrict the speech Democrats didn’t like.
Zuckerberg himself defended free speech in a powerful speech at Georgetown University in 2019:” We can continue to support it, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey toward greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the price is too high. I’m here today because I think we must continue to support free speech.
The federal government pressed Facebook to appoint solutions on issues ranging from Covid coverage to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. The Biden White House was actively urging Facebook to change its standards, including those that lower the Daily Wire traffic, by 2021. That same year, in April, our traffic began to plummet. Overall, our reach dropped by 90 %.  ,
Facebook got comfortable with censorship, Zuckerberg has admitted as much. The Biden administration, Zuckerberg claims, pushed for censorship. And Facebook conceded.
Not anymore. As Zuckerberg explained this week,” The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech”. That is absolutely correct. Additionally, it is a damning indictment of a Democratic Party that always places power before principle. Democrats ‘ abandonment of free speech has made it a Republican principle. And now free speech is returning. Let’s hope that remains a permanent feature of the social media landscape, not merely a temporary move to buy off the resurgent Trump administration.
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