Facebook says that it will no longer censor content in a 5-minute video by founder Mark Zuckerberg. He admits that Facebook worked with the Biden administration to censor content and create content rules and that cost the company dearly in trust and, more importantly, user engagement.
Zuckerberg says that he will get rid of the “independent” fact checkers because they have been too political and move towards a Community Notes system like X has. He also says that he will remove rules for posting about topics such as gender and immigration because those rules are “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Zuckerberg says that they will “bring back civic content,” meaning politics. He admits to having suppressed that content because he thought people wanted that to make them less “stressed” but now he feels differently.
He says that he will move his content moderation teams out of California to Texas. What does this say about California? That it is a place where there is a “concern about the bias of our teams,” he says. In other words, people don’t trust the state or anyone who lives there to be fair.
Lastly, he kisses the ring of the incoming Trump administration, saying that he will “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” He admits that resisting government censorship has been “so difficult over the past four years, when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship” and that this has emboldened other governments to go even further.” An admission of what we all knew: that the Biden administration was Orwellian.
Can anyone really trust Facebook to make this about face after having succumbed to such draconian censorship? And is it too late to save the platform from being for anyone but grandparents?
