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Some potentially huge news for free speech, as Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has recently announced that he will be significantly scaling back the censorship of “misinformation” and “hate speech” on Meta.
This is something to be welcomed, irrespective of what you might think of Zuckerberg's motives or the timing of this decision, because it's going to affect a massive number of users of Meta. Currently, roughly a third of the world's population, if not more, is estimated to be users of Meta. That's a third of the planet Earth. A massive number of users, a massive number of citizens, will be affected by these changes.
And what are the changes that he's proposing? One is to basically dump fact-checking as a policy—I imagine that means firing fact-checkers, so that industry will not be very happy about that—and shifting to the community notes system, which is currently used on X. This system is a more democratic method for flagging content, contextualizing it, and critiquing it.
In general, Zuckerberg has said that he wants to allow for freer discourse on Meta. He wants to return to the original mission, if you will. He wants much less question-begging sorts of censorship of politically sensitive information, and he wants to allow more political debate on Meta.
Now, of course, the timing is very convenient—you know, Trump has just been elected—so obviously this is politically convenient and it's probably good business. We shouldn't forget that this is the man who is responsible for a platform that engaged in systematic censorship of medical debate and political debate over recent years. But putting that aside, whatever you might think of Zuckerberg, and even if you rightly think that he has done an awful lot of harm to citizens, this change in Meta’s policies is a big win for free speech.
To those who say, “that's just words, he hasn't done anything yet,” I would say, well, we can't be sure exactly how he will implement this on the Meta platforms in the coming months and years. It might not be everything we're looking for, but the fact that he's declared it publicly means that he has to do something. He has to make a change, otherwise he loses all credibility as a businessman.
So I believe that this is very significant and credible. We are going to see a lot more discussion of sensitive, controversial issues, on the Meta platforms in the coming months and years.
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