URGENT: Free speech wins at Meta

The world's most important social media company is largely dropping its efforts at leftist-flavored censorship. Thanks, O'Elon!

Free speech is on the march.

And Elon Musk deserves much of the credit.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced his platforms would stop restricting posts about immigration and gender - and stop using (usually liberal) third-party “fact checkers” as a way to censor (usually conservative) accounts.

Zuckerberg phrased the change as a principled return to Facebook’s “roots around free expression and giving people voice.” Or maybe he just understood independents and Republicans are sick of being told what they can say - and that continued “fact-checking” would win him no friends in the Trump Administration. With X allowing unfettered speech, Zuckerberg’s controls became untenable.

But whatever Zuckerberg’s motives, as someone who has faced ideologically biased “fact-checks,” I can tell you this move will be a huge step in returning true free speech to Facebook - and the world. X is more influential among the chattering classes, but Facebook remains the largest and most powerful social media platform globally.

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(It’s funny because it’s true. To see the actual post the fact-checkers called false, click here. )

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The “fact-checking” business first exploded in 2020 and 2021, as a way for legacy media to fight social media’s expanding influence.

But it was obvious from the beginning that “fact-checking” is an inherently dishonest enterprise. Aside from catching trivial and obvious errors, fact-checkers are always introducing their own biases; they are essentially writing opinion pieces.

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(Here for free speech. When it’s popular. And when it’s not. Stand with me.)

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Here’s what I mean.

If I write: The United States has 500 million people, I have made a clear error of fact.

But what about: The mRNA Covid vaccines were rushed to market.

Well, yes, they certainly were. Less than a year after they were invented, they were being given to millions of people.

But a “fact-checker” might call my argument “partially true” or “misleading” because Pfizer and Moderna tested them on tens of thousands of people before they were authorized.

In turn, I could (and do) argue that despite their size, the clinical trials were inadequate to judge either safety or efficacy because they were unblinded - and effectively ended - much too soon. A fact-checker might respond that regulators had given the companies the okay to break the trial blinds quickly.

You get the idea. There’s no single set of facts here. We’re having a debate.¹

And it’s far better - both philosophically and practically - for big platforms to let their users argue than try to impose top-down answers.

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In his thread announcing the end of fact-checking, Zuckerberg noted that he planned to “[b]ring back civic content” because “[w]e’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again.”

Put another way: cat videos aren’t enough. For better or worse, hundreds of millions of people get their news every day from Facebook. The platform has a responsibility to let them see all sides of an issue.

And because it is so dependent on liability protection from the federal law commonly called Section 230, it risks damaging its business by picking political sides and causing blowback from the side it does not choose. (Elon Musk appears not to care about this risk as he moves closer to Donald Trump - but then again, he owns X outright and is responsible only to himself and a few limited partners, not public shareholders.)

Naturally, the fact-checkers - faced with the prospect of losing their social media paychecks and having to compete with real journalists - are whining mightily. A British group called Full Fact went so far as to compare itself to police officers and firefights, writing that “fact checkers are first responders in the information environment.”

Lol.

And that’s a fact.

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(Fact-checking the old-fashioned way. It’s called journalism.)

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And the full story Instagram censored above is here. It’s as true now as it was in 2023. Judge for yourself:

1. The fact-checkers have even argued that “less than a year after they were invented” was wrong, because the basics of mRNA biotechnology have been in development for decades. But, in general, the timeline of drug or vaccine development dates not from the basic scientific findings but from the time the actual chemical compound or biotechnology product was invented, or sometimes first tested on humans. Otherwise we might as well date all drugs back to the Hippocratic Oath.