Pandering? Or repentant?

Despite the fact that The Price of Liberty is published on WordPress, which is a form of social media, we here at TPOL don’t really like social media. There are many reasons, but a major one is the ability of a small but powerful group of people to censor what is written. Whether it is Truth Social, or X, or Facebook, or YouTube. Or a dozen other versions.

Facebook has been a prime example of this, led by the infamous Mark Zuckerberg.

Recently, though, this guy seems to have lost his spots. He recently wrote:

I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today, but a lot has happened over the last several years. There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously. And I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.

So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts. That’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.

The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.

First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X. Speaker1: Starting in the US, after Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.

Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas and it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms. Third, we’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.

We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations and for lower severity violations. We’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t.

We’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US based content review is going to be based in Texas as we work to promote free expression. I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.

Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.

The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US 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.

These can be seen as welcome, and brave, words. If he is sincere, it represents a major victory for freedom of speech in the modern world – at least in the Fifty States. It is a world game changer and a breath of fresh air. If he is sincere. If this is true, and not just a ploy to hide his continued shilling for the government (not just the current regime and not just the Deep State). Not just a way of kissing up to the new Massa.

If he has truly repented of his support of “fact checking” and other techniques that are designed – and have – suppressed free speech. Suppressed the truth all too often when that truth was unacceptable, unpalatable, and not wanted by the powers-that-be.

Has he? We may not know for months. After all, the promises he makes cannot necessarily be accomplished overnight. And he may regret them and backpedal.

After all, the MSM is universally condemning this announcement. NBC for example, condemned this “rollback” for “usher[ing] in [a] chaotic online era. The NYT, NPR, CBS, CNN, and many others in this mainstream media cabal find it horrible and accuse Zuckerberg of cozening up to The Donald, turning “hard” to the right, and “refusing to listen to his users.” Of course, this is no surprise.

And a good sign: the mainstream media, however much it has fractured in the past 30-35 years, regrets the loss of power it had before the internet.

But if Zuckerberg has joined Musk and libertarians and

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2025/01/13/pandering-or-repentant/