Contra Beege: Take the Win

Winning. 

So. Much. Winning. 

I’m not tired of it yet, to be honest. 

I am, this time, referring to Mark Zuckerberg’s epiphany regarding free speech. Suddenly, after more than a decade of increasingly draconian censorship, Zuckerberg is doing a 180° turn and is promising to emulate the (more or less) free speech policies put in place by Elon Musk on X.

No more fact checkers. Much less content moderation (there will always be some line beyond which you cannot cross), and an embrace of the spirit of free speech. It is, in short, going to be a sea change in how Meta regulates speech on Facebook.

Here is the full video from Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of censorship and misinformation policies.

I highly recommend you watch all of it as tonally it is one of the biggest indications of “elections have consequences” I have ever seen pic.twitter.com/aYpkxrTqWe

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) January 7, 2025

Zuck has even brought in some MAGA folks to help reform the platform. 

Wow, these sudden revelations about how it was the U.S government, under the Biden Regime, pushing for censorship of contrary opinions.
Kaplan even acknowledges that they were being pushed by the Biden Regime to censor humor and satire, knowing it was humor and satire, under the… https://t.co/bbR59Owud1

— Cruadin (@cruadin) January 7, 2025

It is, in short, just one more indication of the vibe shift in the country, with the pendulum swinging quickly from left to right. Companies are dropping DEI like a hot potato, corporations are no longer pledging allegiance to woke and CRT, and even banks are dropping policies that push climate and ESG goals in their clients (did you know they did that?). 

Mark Zuckerberg is vibe-shifting—hard. This morning he announced that Meta would end its controversial fact-checking regime; reduce censorship on Instagram and Facebook; implement “Community Notes”; allow the promotion of political content; and work with President Donald Trump to… pic.twitter.com/pKEbMivSCb

— The Free Press (@TheFP) January 7, 2025

The Free Press is taking a bow, rightly so, for their work exposing the Twitter Files and for their dogged fight to make speech great again. Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, and all the warriors for free speech are cautiously optimistic, if more than bit peeved that it took so long. 

—@RupaSubramanya: “I Report for The Free Press. And I Can’t Post My Stories on Facebook.” https://t.co/8W32DqzDC6

— The Free Press (@TheFP) January 7, 2025

But you have to give the most credit to Trump’s victory in November–the in-your-face middle finger given by the American people to the smug media and political elite who have been at the vanguard of the speech suppression movement. The EU, no doubt, is quaking in its boots, since pressuring X alone was supposed to frighten the other social media companies into compliance, but with Elon Musk glued to Donald Trump they may reconsider their speech policies. 

Keir Starmer, apparently, is so angry at Elon Musk’s free speech that he is letting it be known that Britain may pull away from intelligence sharing and military agreements with the United States. 

Good luck with that. 

Keir Starmer is playing a dangerous game here.

If Donald Trump were so inclined, he could double gas prices, crash the economy and bring down the UK government practically overnight.

Britain once ruled the waves, but America is King nowadays. That is just the way it is.

— Ben Kew (@ben_kew) January 7, 2025

Europeans may be having a temper tantrum, as well as the “fact checkers” and “media reporters” like Brian Stelter, but it’s pretty clear that Trump and Musk have the upper hand, and the big corporations know it. More, I suspect they prefer Trump’s form of bullying to the Biden regime’s since it amounts to “stay in your lane” rather than “you had better reform the world into our image.”

I agree almost entirely with Beege’s cri de coere of yesterday. She is entirely correct when she argues that Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for and that we shouldn’t trust that he has seen the light rather than just responding to the zeitgeist. 

But contra Beege I don’t care. At least not much. 

Facebook is powerful, ubiquitous, and still has a lot of cultural sway. A vibe shift on Facebook is a very good thing and if Mark grits his teeth while doing the right thing or has temper tantrums on his $300 million yacht, so what? The results matter more than what is deeply buried in the soul of Mark Zuckerberg. 

We have been fighting for this change for quite a while now–I have been off Facebook for years now, mostly because there was so little I could say without being labels a misinforming hatemonger bent on terrorizing women, children, and small puppies. I won’t likely go back, but then again I can rant here. 

Others can’t, and Facebook and X have different use cases. 

I actually think it is just within the realm of possibility that Zuckerberg actually has had a change of heart–many have in the past year or two on many issues, including Musk. J.D. Vance himself began as a NeverTrumper and is now the incoming VP, so it is possible. 

But whether or not Zuck has had a change of heart or just his finger to the wind, he is moving in the right direction. We shouldn’t make that too painful, even if it feels like justice.