Move over Elon Musk, another billionaire has hit the headlines. And he didn’t even have to demand the jailing of a prime minister to do so. It’s Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Meta. Yesterday he released the most extraordinary video. Sporting unruly curls, a black tee and dog-tag chain – the uniform of the millennial oligarch – he announced that Meta’s platforms would give their ‘fact-checkers’ the heave-ho and ‘dramatically reduce the amount of censorship’ they carry out. I doubt a more impactful mea culpa will be issued this year.
We’re coached to be cynical these days, but I’ll be honest with you: Zuckerberg’s statement put a big, dumb smile on my face. Here we had one of the captains of Silicon Valley confessing that the boss class to which he belongs has indeed been enforcing a regime of political censure, while also promising to do something about it. Those of us who think you should be free to wander into the town square of social media and say ‘People with dicks are not women!’ or ‘Covid might have come from a lab!’ have cause to be optimistic this morning.
No longer will users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads have ‘fact-checkers’ peering over their shoulder as they post. Starting in the US, Meta will ‘get rid of fact-checkers’, Zuckerberg said, and ‘replace them with community notes similar to X’. That’s Musk’s user-generated system of correction, where swarms of tweeters can add caveats and additional info to posts that are misleading or untrue. Our fact-checkers have ‘just been too politically biased’ said Zuckerberg, and they’ve ‘destroyed more trust than they’ve created’. Welcome, young man, to we merry few who’ve been arguing for years that ‘fact-checking’ is doublespeak for the sidelining of dissent and enforcement of orthodoxy.
Zuckerberg confessed that the ancien régime of post-policing by ideologues dolled up as fact-checkers led to the punishment of perfectly normal beliefs. On topics like ‘immigration and gender’ there was a ‘bunch of restrictions’, he said. And they were ‘out of touch with mainstream discourse’. Many of us knew this. Many of us knew that Facebook’s memory-holing of ‘anti-immigrant views’ and its sexist disciplining of feminists who think men are not women was an ideological crusade masquerading as a clampdown on ‘hate speech’. But it’s still good to hear the man at the top of that old McCarthyism say it out loud.
Zuckerberg is clearly feeling the heat of the masses’ irritation with wokeness. He said the election of Donald Trump felt like ‘a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech’. Zuckerberg appears to be submitting to the 77million people who voted for Trump and in the process noisily registered their displeasure with the beliefs and behaviour of Zuckerberg’s own class. A techno-feudalist bowing to the throng? I’m here for it.
We will one day look back in bewilderment, if not outright horror, at this era of tech censorship. It is insane that feminists were booted off pre-Musk Twitter for saying ‘him’ about a bloke in a dress who tried to pressure immigrant women to wax his bollocks. And that you could be sent to ‘Facebook jail’ for stating biological facts, or wondering out loud if mass immigration is a problem, or opposing the mask mandates of the Covid era. Millions of people were reprimanded for challenging ideas so crazy only billionaires and students could believe them.
At times, Meta was a straightforward stooge of officialdom, a snivelling enforcer of its thought control. Zuckerberg admitted as much last year, when he said Facebook had been ‘repeatedly pressured’ by the Biden administration to ‘censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire’. He says he regrets not pushing back harder against these despotic requests that even wisecracks be crushed. Facebook also dutifully censored pesky commentary on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in 2020, lest it undermine Biden Snr’s run for the White House. Pulping news stories for the benefit of the ruling class? Yeah, Zuckerberg has much to mea culpa for.
One of the maddest things about the era of techno-censorship was the left’s love for it. Far from criticising the boss class for silencing their fellow citizens, leftists cheered on these cruel curbs on free thought. ‘These are private companies and they can do what they like’, they crowed at feminists who only wanted the liberty to say lesbians don’t have cocks. Nothing better captured the death of the left than its doff-capping to billionaires on a mission to shut down the liberty to think.
Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg’s statement has struck dread into the hearts of the woke everywhere. ‘Dismay as fact-checking ditched on Facebook in “free speech” drive’, says today’s Guardian. You can almost hear the fear at the New York Times, whose headline says: ‘Meet the next fact-checker… you.’ Imagine that! Ordinary people who never went to Yale and don’t know what ‘Latinx’ means being trusted to weigh up facts for themselves! The demented wailing of former newspaper editor David Yelland captures the foreboding in right-thinking circles at the prospect of us oiks becoming our own fact-checkers: we’re witnessing the ‘craven surrender of Mark Zuckerberg’, he cries. Surrender to what? A little more liberty? The right of the masses to think for themselves? Good. More powerful people should be made to surrender to this democratic imperative.
The terror of the right-on in response to Zuckerberg’s statement gives the game away. These people are mad because they know very well what ‘fact-checking’ entails: the marshalling of their own supposedly ‘expert’ beliefs against the rude thinking of the little people. They know that any chipping away of the ‘fact-checking’ regime is a chipping away at their own cultural power, their intellectual dominion over the great unwashed. Well, suck it up. The days of us being lectured about ‘facts’ by people who think men can get pregnant are long gone.
They’re right to be scared. Not just because of Zuckerberg’s statement, but because cultural change is in the air. It feels like we’re living through a bonfire of the orthodoxies. On everything from Britain’s rape gangs to the gender ideology, from Islamist terrorism to the mutilation of young homosexuals, from the divisive creed of DEI to the bullshit idea of ‘hate speech’, people are speaking up. And the elite’s old retorts of ‘transphobe’, ‘Islamophobe’ and ‘xenophobe’ aren’t landing any more. Their power to silence us with such shaming labels is waning, dramatically. And about time, too.
Is all won? Far from it. It is not in the gift of a billionaire to grant us liberty. Freedom is something we take, and do, not something we’re given. Censorship remains a scourge, especially in Europe, and it will take more than a five-minute video from Mark Zuckerberg to overthrow it. But if more of the rich and powerful ‘surrender’ to the idea that censorship is bad, I’ll keep smiling.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
No longer will users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads have ‘fact-checkers’ peering over their shoulder as they post. Starting in the US, Meta will ‘get rid of fact-checkers’, Zuckerberg said, and ‘replace them with community notes similar to X’. That’s Musk’s user-generated system of correction, where swarms of tweeters can add caveats and additional info to posts that are misleading or untrue. Our fact-checkers have ‘just been too politically biased’ said Zuckerberg, and they’ve ‘destroyed more trust than they’ve created’. Welcome, young man, to we merry few who’ve been arguing for years that ‘fact-checking’ is doublespeak for the sidelining of dissent and enforcement of orthodoxy.
Zuckerberg confessed that the ancien régime of post-policing by ideologues dolled up as fact-checkers led to the punishment of perfectly normal beliefs. On topics like ‘immigration and gender’ there was a ‘bunch of restrictions’, he said. And they were ‘out of touch with mainstream discourse’. Many of us knew this. Many of us knew that Facebook’s memory-holing of ‘anti-immigrant views’ and its sexist disciplining of feminists who think men are not women was an ideological crusade masquerading as a clampdown on ‘hate speech’. But it’s still good to hear the man at the top of that old McCarthyism say it out loud.
Zuckerberg is clearly feeling the heat of the masses’ irritation with wokeness. He said the election of Donald Trump felt like ‘a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech’. Zuckerberg appears to be submitting to the 77million people who voted for Trump and in the process noisily registered their displeasure with the beliefs and behaviour of Zuckerberg’s own class. A techno-feudalist bowing to the throng? I’m here for it.
We will one day look back in bewilderment, if not outright horror, at this era of tech censorship. It is insane that feminists were booted off pre-Musk Twitter for saying ‘him’ about a bloke in a dress who tried to pressure immigrant women to wax his bollocks. And that you could be sent to ‘Facebook jail’ for stating biological facts, or wondering out loud if mass immigration is a problem, or opposing the mask mandates of the Covid era. Millions of people were reprimanded for challenging ideas so crazy only billionaires and students could believe them.
At times, Meta was a straightforward stooge of officialdom, a snivelling enforcer of its thought control. Zuckerberg admitted as much last year, when he said Facebook had been ‘repeatedly pressured’ by the Biden administration to ‘censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire’. He says he regrets not pushing back harder against these despotic requests that even wisecracks be crushed. Facebook also dutifully censored pesky commentary on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in 2020, lest it undermine Biden Snr’s run for the White House. Pulping news stories for the benefit of the ruling class? Yeah, Zuckerberg has much to mea culpa for.
One of the maddest things about the era of techno-censorship was the left’s love for it. Far from criticising the boss class for silencing their fellow citizens, leftists cheered on these cruel curbs on free thought. ‘These are private companies and they can do what they like’, they crowed at feminists who only wanted the liberty to say lesbians don’t have cocks. Nothing better captured the death of the left than its doff-capping to billionaires on a mission to shut down the liberty to think.
Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg’s statement has struck dread into the hearts of the woke everywhere. ‘Dismay as fact-checking ditched on Facebook in “free speech” drive’, says today’s Guardian. You can almost hear the fear at the New York Times, whose headline says: ‘Meet the next fact-checker… you.’ Imagine that! Ordinary people who never went to Yale and don’t know what ‘Latinx’ means being trusted to weigh up facts for themselves! The demented wailing of former newspaper editor David Yelland captures the foreboding in right-thinking circles at the prospect of us oiks becoming our own fact-checkers: we’re witnessing the ‘craven surrender of Mark Zuckerberg’, he cries. Surrender to what? A little more liberty? The right of the masses to think for themselves? Good. More powerful people should be made to surrender to this democratic imperative.
The terror of the right-on in response to Zuckerberg’s statement gives the game away. These people are mad because they know very well what ‘fact-checking’ entails: the marshalling of their own supposedly ‘expert’ beliefs against the rude thinking of the little people. They know that any chipping away of the ‘fact-checking’ regime is a chipping away at their own cultural power, their intellectual dominion over the great unwashed. Well, suck it up. The days of us being lectured about ‘facts’ by people who think men can get pregnant are long gone.
They’re right to be scared. Not just because of Zuckerberg’s statement, but because cultural change is in the air. It feels like we’re living through a bonfire of the orthodoxies. On everything from Britain’s rape gangs to the gender ideology, from Islamist terrorism to the mutilation of young homosexuals, from the divisive creed of DEI to the bullshit idea of ‘hate speech’, people are speaking up. And the elite’s old retorts of ‘transphobe’, ‘Islamophobe’ and ‘xenophobe’ aren’t landing any more. Their power to silence us with such shaming labels is waning, dramatically. And about time, too.
Is all won? Far from it. It is not in the gift of a billionaire to grant us liberty. Freedom is something we take, and do, not something we’re given. Censorship remains a scourge, especially in Europe, and it will take more than a five-minute video from Mark Zuckerberg to overthrow it. But if more of the rich and powerful ‘surrender’ to the idea that censorship is bad, I’ll keep smiling.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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