Don't Trust Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg declares that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp) will decrease censorship across its platforms
The idea that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, strongly believes in the principle of free speech all of a sudden is insane. When it was politically convenient for him, he did everything he could to undermine and censor Donald Trump and his supporters. Now that the political winds have shifted, and social media rival X is becoming more popular (not to mention smaller platforms like Substack and Rumble), Zuckerberg suddenly believes censorship is a bad thing.
Zuckerberg tells you exactly what he wants in this video: He wants the backing of the United States government, soon to be presided over by Donald Trump whom Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade trying to undermine, because governments in Asia, Latin America, and Europe are looking to impose far more burdens on social media companies like Meta, if not outright ban them, if they choose not to censor on behalf of those governments. Elon Musk and X recently bent the knee to a censorious judge in Brazil. So no, Mark Zuckerberg does not believe in your right to express your political beliefs. Mark Zuckerberg takes whatever position will benefit him the most in any given moment, which, at the moment, seems to be taking a public stand against censorship. Even if, as Ken Klippenstein is reporting, it doesn’t actually amount to anything in practice.
The only outcome compatible with free speech and a free society is for Meta to go bankrupt, and for Facebook and Instagram to be relegated to a footnote in the history of the internet. Any organization that would lie to its users and censor them the way Meta has, let alone the entire business model of using them as a product for advertisers, should face the consequences of going out of business. Eventually people will simply move on from these horrible platforms and they will disappear or end up like Frankenstein monsters like Myspace, but Mark Zuckerberg will still be insanely wealthy. If there were any justice in the world then Meta would crash now and Zuckerberg would lose everything.