The Cost of Facebook’s Now-Repudiated Censorship

By Free Republic | Created at 2025-01-11 16:44:21 | Updated at 2025-01-11 19:52:06 3 hours ago

The Cost of Facebook’s Now-Repudiated Censorship
Brownstone Institute ^ | JANUARY 7, 2025 | BY Josh Stylman, Jeffrey A Tucker

Posted on 01/11/2025 8:42:29 AM PST by FlyingEagle

History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers, and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from “misinformation.”

Meta’s sudden dismantling of its fact-checking program – announced by Zuckerberg as a “cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech” – reads like a quiet footnote to what history may record as one of the most staggering violations of fundamental rights in recent memory. After eight years of increasingly aggressive content moderation, including nearly 100 fact-checking organizations operating in over 60 languages, Meta is now pivoting to a community-driven system similar to X’s model.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg first suggests that the censorship was purely a technical mistake, and then changes his tune near the end and admits what has long been litigated: “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 4 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.”

TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Philosophy; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: censorship; freespeech; technology

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A very important commentary about what happened to Freedom of Speech with Facebook-Meta and the Biden Administration plus other governments censorship merge of state + corporate power - which is the definition of fascism for Mussolini.

Zuck may have switched sides, but he was all-in for a long time including the Biden election funding.

1 posted on 01/11/2025 8:42:29 AM PST by FlyingEagle

To: FlyingEagle

2 posted on 01/11/2025 8:43:04 AM PST by FlyingEagle

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