Why are some folks gobbling up the notion that having the newly restored right to fire off as many “c**ts,” *d**ks,” and “a*****es” as you want on Facebook is the best thing for free speech since the Magna Carta?
Facebook’s safe space for easily triggered mental midgets is now supposed to suddenly transform into a beacon of free speech and debate. But only for some. Sort of. Who are apparently now free to call transgenderism a mental illness, for example. Everyone else will have to wait for their potential future liberation from the virtual hall monitor.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and its parent company, Meta, has just announced that audiences won’t be subjected to thought policing through fact-checking anymore. Well, American audiences, at least. And not by professional gatekeepers designated specifically for the task. The language patrol will also apparently unclench a bit.
“Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model,” the company announced, citing the open collaborative model of Elon Musk’s X Platform. The move comes in the wake of Zuckerberg’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago where he met with incoming US President-elect Donald Trump – who was himself banned and restricted by Meta until last summer – and his perpetual sidekick, self-styled “free speech absolutist” Musk.
Meta’s statement cites “societal and political pressure to moderate content,” claiming that it “has gone too far.” You think? It took Zuckerberg until August 2024 to admit to a congressional committee that “in 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” and that it........