Wearing a watch that cost almost $1 million, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Corp., owners of Facebook and Instagram, took to his flagship social media platform to announce that he was ending Meta’s censorship program.
There are many conservatives who may have contributed to Zuckerberg’s decision, chief among them (along with President-elect Donald Trump) are the members of the Free Speech coalition put together by the Media Research Center’s Chairman Brent Bozell and Dan Schneider, MRC Vice President for Free Speech. We at CHQ are happy to have been part of their tireless efforts to keep free speech on the front burner with the grassroots and leading conservative commentators and influencers.
While conservatives welcomed Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcement and found his remark that he would be moving Facebook’s Trust and Safety and Content Moderation units to Texas interesting, not everyone bought the idea that Facebook and Instagram were really going to change.
Reverting to a less restrictive algorithm and business model may be Mr. Zuckerberg’s intention today, but that hardly makes up for his abusive actions of the past.
As Teri Christoph of Smart Girl Politics explained:
...Zuck's newfound love of free speech is just words at this point. His half-hearted pledge to improve things rings hollow to conservatives who have been under the ban hammer for at least a decade. An apology would be a good place to start, but being a leftist means never having to apologize.
There was some talk on X Tuesday about Facebook providing reparations to all the conservative accounts they damaged over the years, and I'm all for it. Zuck should put some money where his mouth is and prove he's serious about stopping the censorship.
Reparations for conservatives!
And Ms. Christoph is right, it wasn’t just that Facebook wouldn’t allow conservatives to say certain things that were true, it was also that they were arbitrarily and capriciously deprived of the opportunity to partake in Facebook’s lucrative marketplace and monetize their content through sales or soliciting donations for their organizations or causes.
Our good friend Ben Weingarten put it this way in an op-ed for the New York Post, “On Zuckerberg Free Speech About-Face We Must Distrust and Verify:”
Are those who have had their rights violated when Meta acted as the feds’ deputized speech police just supposed to accept this 180?
What about the outlets who lost traffic and saw their business models imperiled?
And how about the American public at large that lost out on critical news and views that could have swung the 2020 election — allowing us to avoid the disasters of the last four years — or led to pandemic mitigation measures that would have protected our liberty and preserved our prosperity rather than eroding them both?
The least Zuckerberg could do, as The Post’s Miranda Devine has suggested, is open the Facebook Files so Americans can get a full accounting of Meta’s censorship efforts, which would form the basis for informing executive action, legislation, and potential lawsuits.
And to that end, shouldn’t Zuckerberg support — with released documents, if not legal and financial support — those engaged in litigation right now against federal authorities aimed at prohibiting their collusion, coercion and cajoling of social media platforms to censor protected speech?
Should Zuckerberg not also provide some sort of restitution to those who lost their accounts under censorious policies barring their core political speech without any sort of due process — particularly if those policies came under government duress?
We agree with Ms. Christoph and Mr. Weingarten that there’s no reason to trust Zuckerberg’s newfound commitment to free speech, particularly absent any effort to make whole those damaged by his previous policies.
If Mark Zuckerberg really wants to convince conservatives they will be safe from censorship and demonetization on Facebook he can start by opening the books and revealing who, what, when and how Deep State operatives forced the censorship regime on him in the first place and move on to a discussion of compensation of those damaged from there.
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