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Mark Zuckerberg concedes that Meta has made serious mistakes and suppressed content, and has announced he will dump fact-checkers. Here are five astonishing admissions in this massive win for free speech.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that his companies Facebook, Instagram and Threads will undergo a major overhaul.

In his announcement yesterday, Zuckerberg hailed changes to uphold free speech and prevent censorship.

“I started building social media to give people a voice”, he says in a video posted to his Facebook account. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.”

Five Dramatic Confirmations of What We Already Knew

The five-minute video is frank and revealing. Zuckerberg freely admits to many mistakes and coverups that have occurred, particularly over the past four years.

Singling out just one of these issues would be staggering in itself. But to have a candid reveal-all highlighting so many of them is almost unbelievable.

Let’s take a quick look at Zuckerberg’s admissions.

1. Meta Censors Free Speech

First, Zuckerberg confesses that Meta has wandered away — willingly — from upholding the right to free speech. His resolve that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression” only makes sense as part of a broader admission that Meta has routinely suppressed free speech.

Zuckerberg blamed the complex algorithms for causing truthful content to be taken down, shadow-banned and censored. While the algorithms were coded “in good faith”, “the problem is that filters make mistakes and take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t”, he claimed.

He says his way forward is to change the way the algorithms scan posts and dramatically dial back their ability to censor content.

According to Zuckerberg, this will “reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scan for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus our attention on tackling illegal and high-severity violations.”

Such admissions are nothing new, and Zuckerberg himself seems to have gone through something of a transition since the Covid years.

As far back as 18 months ago, he confessed that social media platforms were actively censoring content about Covid-19 that went against the ever-changing scientific consensus.

“Unfortunately”, he confessed, “I think a lot of the… establishment… kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true… It really undermines trust.”

Mark Zuckerberg says it was challenging to censor COVID misinformation because the scientific establishment was frequently wrong, which ultimately undermined public trust:

“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health… pic.twitter.com/y0ZaX4kmCE

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 9, 2023

2. Fact-Checkers are Factual In Name Only

The second admission is that fact-checkers have not been the upholders of the truth they purport to be. Neither has what Zuckerberg slights as the “legacy media”.

The world’s third-richest man framed the context of fact-checkers this way: “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.”

The response to this “threat to democracy,” he added, was to employ fact-checkers, which were presumed to be unbiased gatekeepers of the truth.

However, the reality was otherwise, Zuckerberg explains.

“The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created”, he now admits.

As a result, Meta will get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with a Community Notes feature, similar to Elon Musk’s initiative on X (formerly Twitter), where users are able to add context to posts they believe to convey untruthful information or present ideas in a biased manner.

3. Meta Censors Content on Gender and Immigration

Thirdly, Zuckerberg reveals that gender and immigration are taboo subjects that attract the ire of Meta’s algorithms. Or more precisely, Meta has been in the business of favouring certain “mainstream” views on immigration and gender while punishing others.

But no longer. According to Zuckerberg, Meta will soon “get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, that are 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.”

4. The Biden Administration Pushed for Censorship and Control Over Political Discourse

Zuckerberg has hailed the recent US election result as “a cultural tipping point” that has shifted culture towards “once again prioritising speech.”

That is as astonishing an admission from the head of Meta as you’ll ever read.

Zuckerberg also revealed that he will “work with President Trump” to protect free speech on a global scale. This will be achieved by standing against “governments around the world that are going after American companies, and pushing to censor more.”

Responding as to why he is making these changes now, Zuckerberg reveals that “over the past four years, 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 the cultural winds have shifted, and Meta is hoisting sail.

With the second inauguration of Trump less than two weeks away, scheduled for the 20th of January, “It feels like we’re in a new era now”, Zuckerberg explains.

“Now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”

In response, Trump welcomed Zuckerberg’s commitment to free speech and said that Meta had “come a long way”.

Asked by a journalist whether Zuckerberg was “directly responding” to threats Trump had made to him in the past, the President-elect responded, “Probably”.

5. Elon Musk Has Led the Way

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, he did so for the express purpose of restoring free speech on the platform.

A little over two years later, Zuckerberg is following in his footsteps. That is a momentous endorsement of a business competitor and an acknowledgement that Musk had it right all along.

Meta will implement its own Community Notes feature “similar to X” – as Zuckerberg puts it.

But in a move almost akin to Trump moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Meta will move its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California to more conservative Texas.

Musk previously announced he was moving the headquarters of X from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, on 16 July 2024.

Zuckerberg is candid about the motives behind what will be a significant uprooting of Meta’s location.

He says it is about building “trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

In short, the deep-rooted political and cultural bias in Silicon Valley is not suitable for a company aiming to win back the trust of the American and global population. It will demonstrate the company’s commitment to freedom of speech, not just in promises and policy announcements, but with bricks and mortar, and tangible change.

While he is commitment to change, Zuckerberg is still lagging behind Musk. But to his credit, he has identified the right footsteps to follow. Few would have predicted that Zuckerberg would take Musk’s lead. Yet, here we are.

This gives us great encouragement to shine our light (Matthew 5:16) that others might follow in our footsteps (1 Corinthians 11:1). Who knows how it will impact the people around us?

Will This Change Be Long-Lasting?

The announcement by Meta’s CEO is an astounding victory for freedom of speech. It comes after years where such a possibility seemed well entrenched in the “impossible” (Luke 1:37) category.

But how substantial, principled and long-lasting this new stance is will be determined in the coming months and years.

The Daily Declaration has for many years been the victim of extensive shadow-banning on Facebook, which severely hurts our reach and exposure.

With this welcome announcement, the Daily Declaration will write a formal letter to Meta, requesting this censorship to end, in line with its new policy commitments.

We won’t hold our breath, but we hope and pray that substantial change is on the way.

What is truly astonishing about Zuckerberg’s announcement is not the content of what he said, since he was for the most part stating facts we already knew. What’s astonishing is that it’s coming from a man who led a company that for the past several years has done just the opposite.

That should give us optimism that the “impossibles” may well keep on coming. Watch this space.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons.