Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to “get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram” marks an astonishing turnaround in the long, twilight struggle over information in the digital age. In this conflict, it should be noted, Zuckerberg has played a Hamlet-like part, uncertain whether to be or not to be an advocate of openness and free speech. His latest decision to embrace a set of grand principles was doubtless influenced by political considerations; now he stands accused of currying favor with the free-speech rebels of the incoming Trump crowd.
But at 3 billion monthly active users and 100 billion pieces of content daily, Facebook remains, at least for now, the brontosaurus in the room when it comes to social media. Informationally, whichever side Zuckerberg favors has the advantage. His shift away from censorship, if carried out, would be a momentous victory for the public over the gatekeepers, the populists over the institutions, and Texas over California. The cultural vibe of the second Trump administration, I’m guessing, will differ radically from that of the first.
The reorientation promised by Zuckerberg seems, on the face of it, substantial. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, will summarily dismiss the despised third-party “fact-checkers.” The stated reason is that they were found to be “too politically biased,” but that was their original point. The whole operation was a protection racket, but it’s no longer worth the money in the age of Trump. In a telling sign of respect for Elon Musk, the top-down fact-checkers will be replaced by a more horizontal community notes system, similar to that of X.
The tangle of thou-shall-nots around sensitive topics “like immigration and gender” will be unraveled, with most restrictions dropped. Algorithms will automatically take down “illegal and high-severity violations” only. The platforms will take notice of venial sins only if users report them. In a symbolic gesture both ridiculously transparent and cunning, Zuckerberg is sending his trust and content-moderation teams on a pilgrimage of redemption, from bondage in deep-blue California to the promised land of Texas. Finally, Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and intimate buddy of Trump, has been invited to join Meta’s board.
Zuckerberg claimed to be “excited” by “the opportunity to restore free expression,” but few who commented on his speech felt similarly thrilled. Those on the left wrote him off as a sellout. Those on the right wondered where Zuckerberg’s principles were during the past four years of judicial persecution and censorship.
Zuckerberg characterized his redirection as “getting back to our roots about giving people a voice.” There’s some truth to that. Strange as it may sound today, Facebook was once considered a vector for the democratic impulse, and Zuckerberg a young firebrand, eager to “move fast and break things.” The street insurgency that overthrew Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, for example, was coordinated on Facebook. An organizer, Wael Ghonim, posted on the platform an invitation to a January 2011 protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. According to Ghonim, 1 million users viewed that invitation; 100,000 said they would attend. Three weeks after that initial protest, Mubarak, a pharaonic figure who had ruled for more than 30 years, was gone.
At one point during the revolt, Mubarak switched off the Internet. The move was futile, but it offered a preview of the future. Ruling elites of all denominations, dazed by the deafening “voice” of the public, have tried to end the uproar by reaching, again and again, for what I like to call the Mubarak Switch.
In the U.S., the Mubarak Switch took the form of a censorship apparatus that began surreptitiously within the federal bureaucracy. The pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the January 6 Capitol riot then supplied this apparatus with political momentum, institutional blessing, and funding to the tune of an estimated $267 million from the Biden administration. Its tacit objective was to prevent another political disaster like Trump’s surprise win in 2016, which traumatized elites blamed on social media in general, and Facebook in particular, for duping the public via content supplied by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This analysis was, to put it mildly, questionable, but progressive players in the Democratic Party and the media needed an explanation for the defeat; the only alternative was to blame themselves.
After the hard rain of 2016, Zuckerberg assumed a place in elite demonology behind only Trump and Putin. The Democrats saw him as a plutocrat destroying democracy for fun and profit. Republicans saw a left-leaning censor of conservative and Christian discourse. The news media, whose business model Facebook had obliterated, was only too happy to pile on.
Zuckerberg’s platform, we were told, “manipulates our moods,” “makes people feel lonely and sad,” “can actually make you feel physically sick”—and that’s before we get to the ruination of democracy and the “ripping apart” of our social fabric. Failure to regulate such an irresistibly malevolent technology, one critic predicted, “will likely result in ongoing catastrophes from which we may not recover for a generation or more.” Regulation wasn’t enough for Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats in Congress. Facebook had to be “broken up.” We could only be assured of safety once the beast had been torn limb from limb.
This was a tussle among elites. The old sociopolitical regime, which still regrets the passing of the twentieth century, raged against the tech overlords of Silicon Valley, who pride themselves on their powers of disruption. Zuckerberg zig-zagged between the two sides but felt at home in neither camp. He called claims that Facebook had helped elect Trump “a pretty crazy idea,” adding, “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.” Only days later, having endured a barrage of criticism, he apologized abjectly: he had been “dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive.” That was his first fateful step into the censorship tar pit. Facebook would soon be pleading that it was “working to stop misinformation and false news.”
As late as September 2019, Zuckerberg put forward an idealistic vision of himself as a supporter and enabler of ordinary people—the Wael Ghonim of the world—in their struggle to overcome an antiquated social order: “As networks of people replace the traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society—from government to business to media to communities and more—there is a tendency of some people to lament this change. . . . To the contrary, while any rapid social change creates uncertainty, I believe what we’re seeing is people having more power, and a long term trend reshaping society to be more open and accountable over time.” The message seemed clear: Zuckerberg was still a breaker of things.
Less than six months after this brave proclamation, however, he flipped to the other side. In a remarkable Washington Post opinion piece, he advocated for a “more active role by government and regulators,” to balance “the freedom for people to express themselves” online with the protection of society “from broader harms.” Zuckerberg included “harmful content” and political ads as categories of digital speech in need of regulation. The “networks of people” of the September manifesto, in other words, were to be placed in the care of the “traditional hierarchies.” Politicians and bureaucrats in search of a final solution to the social media problem would have the right to exterminate whatever opinions offended them.
In an October 2019 address to his workforce, Zuckerberg made the case for not breaking up Facebook. The government would have an easier time controlling a single social media behemoth than a multiplicity of competitors.
In the end, what Zuckerberg said mattered less than what he did. When the censorship regime came calling for Facebook, he surrendered unconditionally. He maintains that he did so with great reluctance, pushing back at every step against the Biden administration enforcers, who would “scream” and “curse” at his content teams until they yielded.
The reality is that the crushing of disfavored content on Facebook began even before the pandemic, played a not inconsiderable part in the 2020 election, and remained docile to the Left’s political and ideological mandates until Trump’s big win on November 5, 2024. And let’s keep in mind, it’s not quite over yet. As with every successful system of repression, subversives were singled out for special punishment. Beyond the obvious stupidity of blocking truthful statements and satire, this played havoc with people’s careers and reputations and damaged the financial standing of publications whose viewpoints upset those in power.
Facebook censorship was notorious for its total lack of method—no transparency, no explanation, no true right of appeal. Consider the fate of a peer-reviewed article that questioned the data integrity of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trials. Because two well-known anti-vax figures shared the article, Facebook’s fact-checkers condemned it as “missing context” and restricted access. When the author queried Facebook, the company responded with a number of false claims about the article’s content. When these claims were refuted, the fact-checkers charged the author with not being “unreservedly supportive” of the Pfizer vaccine. The “missing context” tag, journalist Matt Taibbi observed, “should be understood for what it is: an intellectual warning label for true but politically troublesome information.” In a mirror image to Zuckerberg’s post-Trump advocacy of free speech, Facebook ramped up its “limiting misinformation about Covid-19” campaign once Biden arrived at the White House. (City Journal ran into a similar experience in writing factually about research concerning the efficacity of masks in limiting spread of the virus, as John Tierney recounted.)
Treatment of Trump after the January 6 riot followed the same pattern. Prompted by powerful Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration-in-waiting, the news media depicted the incident in the most extreme light possible: it was nothing less than a revolt against the state, with Trump manifestly guilty of rebellion. Silencing Trump on social media thus became a moral imperative. There was just one problem: Trump, still the sitting president, hadn’t violated the platform’s terms of service. Moreover, openly authoritarian rulers like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro smiled out of their own Facebook pages.
Zuckerberg’s solution followed his typical pattern: he leaned toward the most powerful and influential group of the moment: Biden and the Democrats. Asserting that “the risks of allowing President Trump to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg suspended the president, first as a temporary measure, then permanently. Facebook’s Oversight Board, objecting that the platform shouldn’t “just invent an arbitrary penalty,” jumped into the discussion, endorsing the suspension but limiting it to one year. Somehow, that stretched to four. And then, mere months after the reinstatement of Trump’s account in July 2024 and Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg visited the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago and donated $1 million to his inauguration fund.
I see no point in dwelling further on Zuckerberg’s responsibility for misinforming and suppressing the speech of his fellow Americans. The best that can be said of him is that he went along. All the usual topics silenced on Facebook—the Covid lab-leak theory, Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell, violations of race and gender orthodoxy, the targeting of conservative outlets like the New York Post and of dissident leftists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—suffered the same fate elsewhere in social media. Zuckerberg has famously said that the platform is “more like a government than a traditional company,” and he may be right—but only if the government in question resembles that of Singapore.
Zuckerberg, no longer a rowdy twentysomething, has sought to follow the prevailing political winds. He is now 40, married, father of three daughters, owner of a number of stately pleasure domes. His company is a colossal milk cow that just keeps on giving. It may be that he has reached the time and place in life where breaking things feels less appealing than protecting them. His behavior in relation to both power and the public may be motivated by no higher principle than that.
But there is a counterfactual to this languid attitude. Elon Musk may act like an eternal child, but he is 53 and, for no visible gain, has shouldered his way to the front rank in the running battle over free speech. To the hierarchs of the old order, Musk now usurps the place once reserved for Zuckerberg: tech devil extraordinaire. Advocates of an open society can only wonder how many official bans and mandates would poison our information environment today if Musk had played Zuckerberg’s game and catered to the ruling caste.
Free speech warriors, victims of Facebook’s erratic outbursts, will feel tempted to exile Zuckerberg from their camp. “[T]he billionaire tech titan will always be a spineless coward whose monopoly needs to be broken up,” writes Miranda Devine. The moral clarity of this stance can be debated, but as strategy it doesn’t make much sense. You don’t ask a new ally for proofs and apologies amid an existential fight. You send him off to combat and see how he performs.
Disgracefully, the U.S. under the Biden administration set a model for democratic nations in the digital repression of its citizens. Just as disgracefully, Facebook under Zuckerberg’s leadership set a standard for social media in surrendering its users’ interests to the dictates of political power. The U.S. will soon be under new management. Both Zuckerberg and his platform have a chance to atone. We need to find our way back to first principles and to free speech, however arduous the journey.
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images