Editors at National Review Online assess the latest statements from the head of Facebook and Instagram.
The founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced substantial changes to the way that his company’s two most popular products, the social media networks Facebook and Instagram, will be moderated going forward. In a video published Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg committed to “simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.” Among the planned changes are to get “rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X”; to move all content-moderation teams from California to Texas; to accept that certain propositions in the realms of “gender” and “immigration” are debatable — and ought to be debated online as much as “in Congress”; to tune the sites’ “content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content”; and to work with the Trump administration to “push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” In short, Zuckerberg intends to follow the example that was set by Elon Musk after he bought Twitter. It seems that things can, indeed, change fast in tech.
Reasonable observers will debate the purity of Zuckerberg’s motivations. The optimistic case is that Zuckerberg — who apologized last year for having acquiesced to the Biden administration’s many censorship requests — has genuinely recognized the error of his company’s ways. The cynical case is that Zuckerberg is a hollow opportunist who wishes to ingratiate himself with the new administration. Irrespective, the changes that Zuckerberg has announced are all welcome — and, just as important, they are sufficiently concrete as to make measurement easy. If Zuckerberg does not get rid of the fact-checkers in favor of community notes, it will be evident. If he does not move his moderation teams to Texas, it will be clear. If his sites do not stop banning users for expressing quotidian political opinions, it will be obvious. Some of his promises — reworking content filters, for example — will be hard to track directly. But their consequences will not. By publishing his video, Zuckerberg has committed himself. There will be no hiding from the fallout.
