The Era of Censored Social Media Is Over — for America

M ark Zuckerberg’s dismissal of Facebook’s fact-checkers and his replacement of them with a “community notes” approach pioneered by Elon Musk at X (formerly Twitter) signals the end of an aberrant era in American politics that began shortly after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016. The era of trying to manage American political outcomes by having social media superintend, rather than facilitate, political debate is over.

Social media companies were wrongly held up as the instigators and vanguard of progressive political change when used by activists in the Middle East a decade and a half ago, and when the Obama reelection campaign made extensive — and invasive — use of Facebook features in 2012. And in turn, they were wrongly held up as scapegoats for the (orders of magnitude) less intrusive use by Cambridge Analytica, and the voters who empowered Brexit and Donald Trump in that year of populist revolt. Because social media in some ways can shape or alter user behavior, just as the known presence of a camera can do the same, it was wrongly accused of determining (unwelcome) democratic outcomes.

This was a superstition, however. Silicon Valley made a tempting scapegoat because its products seemed to diminish the status, wealth, and influence of traditional media sources and because many governments felt that the industry was under-regulated — not sufficiently tied into the powers that be.

At first, Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that Facebook had determined these outcomes rather than simply revealed them by other means. But when Barack Obama and Angela Merkel personally scolded Mark Zuckerberg, he reacted like a struck dog. “After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it,” the Facebook founder wrote. “This is too important an issue to be dismissive.”

Facebook and Twitter then signed up for the full program of allowing governments to lobby them to suppress narratives, news sources, or user accounts they found “harmful.” And this pattern of behavior went into overdrive during the Covid-19 pandemic. Leftists put their faith in the notion that controlling and monitoring the language used by ordinary citizens would radically shape the outcomes of a respiratory virus. But such control demanded a false and constructed “consensus” among scientists on all sorts of then-disputed ideas about the disease itself, its origin, spread, and the best mitigation tactics. Social media companies gave government health bodies an automatic right-of-reply and correction to the speech of their own citizens. But over time, the companies realized that much of the “misinformation” they were suppressing turned out to be true, or at least plausible. All of this intrusion was justified on a flimsy case that Russia had somehow used social networks to “interfere with” the 2016 election.

But by 2020, it was clear that the U.S. intel community was now doing precisely that itself, when 51 former and then-current intel leaders signed — and released to Politico — a letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop story of the New York Post had “all the classic earmarks” of a Russian plot. They knew at the time that this was false but convinced social media companies to suppress the country’s oldest newspaper and what turned out to be the perfectly true story of Hunter Biden’s at-least-semi-criminal escapades and deeply unethical international buck-raking.

The purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk and his liberation of social media from these left-wing controls have now had a knock-on effect. Jeff Bezos, another tech titan, who bought the Washington Post, seems to have responded by trying to curb the progressive capture of traditional media. Now Zuckerberg is also singing a different tune, ending the reign of Facebook fact-checkers in the United States:

Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.

Zuckerberg cited the conditions of debate within Congress or on traditional media as a model for social media. That is: Social media should broadly reflect the speech rules and norms of American society itself. This is a return to Silicon Valley’s original un-self-conscious idealism, even patriotism. Grateful for America’s free expression, Silicon Valley would help facilitate conversation and free expression globally.

But not everyone believes in this. Fearing Musk’s dramatic statements about European politics, and his support for populist movements there, Brussels has rebuked both Musk and Zuckerberg for changing course. This suggests that European regimes want to continue to stifle free speech. Brussels argues that misinformation isn’t a matter of freedom. And it retains the progressive faith in managing democratic outcomes by regulating what can and can’t be said.

This is a battle to come. China and Russia have already cordoned off their citizens from the free internet and herded them into nationalized and heavily censored social media apps. Europe seeks a halfway solution between authoritarianism and freedom. Does it have the programmers or the regulatory juice to create its own safe space online?

I doubt it.