Facebook and free speech
The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps eternal battle between the experts and the masses has been shifting starkly, even wildly, with the former losing and the latter gaining clout.
That’s been most visible in the series of announcements and selfies emanating from the gaudy precincts of Mar-a-Lago. The experts like to scoff at what they consider a poor man’s idea of how a rich man lives. Those more attuned to the masses can respond that the compound was built with money made from sales of breakfast cereal.
The most striking shift came this week on Tuesday, and not from Mar-a-Lago or snowbound Washington but from Silicon Valley, from a tech titan wearing an elbow-length sweater, a gold chain, and a watch supposedly worth $900,000, the proprietor of Meta and Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.
Previously, Zuckerberg has been on the side of the experts and their efforts to control information available to the masses. After the 2016 election, prompted by the complaints of liberal elites that “misinformation” had somehow been responsible for the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump, Zuckerberg hired so-called fact-checking organizations to place limits on the information Facebook would transmit.
Acting on the conclusions of its “fact-checkers,” Facebook cooperated in the widespread suppression, by old media and new, of the information revealed by the New York Post about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Facebook also, as I wrote in 2021, actively suppressed articles and arguments that the virus that causes COVID-19 came from a lab leak in China, though it let up on its efforts when the Biden White House ordered an investigation of the lab leak hypothesis.
By that time, it was embarrassingly obvious that Facebook was doing the bidding of the Democratic Party and of experts in and out of government, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and cooperating scientists. Rather than aiding the free flow of information, Facebook was suppressing truths embarrassing to experts and elites.
In his statement this week, Zuckerberg suggested that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. “We’ve reached a point where there’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he admitted. He promised to go back to — wait for it — “restoring free speech on our platforms.”
And give him credit for some actual steps. “We’re going to get rid of the fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X.” No wonder free market economist Alex Tabarrok posted, “Elon buying Twitter is saving the world.”
“The fact-checkers,” Zuckerberg went on, “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” Like self-appointed experts everywhere, from macroeconomists who underestimated inflation and public health bureaucrats who required children at summer camps to wear masks, they’re getting the back of the public’s hand.