Facebook top dog Mark Zuckerberg’s Jan. 2025 announcement that he was ending the social media giant’s censorship practices appeared to be a remarkable turnaround. It seemed for a moment as if it heralded nothing less than a genuine crack in the hitherto unassailable edifice of the left’s hatred for the freedom of speech and demand that everyone echo its political and cultural line or suffer the consequences, which began with being deplatformed and ended with the threat of personal and professional ruin as a publicly labeled “racist,” “transphobe,” or “MAGA Republican.” No such luck. Facebook is just as censorious, and far-left, now as it has ever been.
Many people saw this coming, doubting that Mark Zuckerberg was really sincere when he announced that Facebook was no longer going to engage in censorship of those who dissented from the left’s line, and was going to open up the notorious “Facebook jail” and free those who had run afoul of its far-left “hate speech” rules. Yet some dared to hope that the left’s love of silencing those whom it feared and hated had crested in American culture, and was receding. At this point, however, it looks as if the Zuckerberg-skeptics were right: Facebook is as bad as it ever was.
The Daily Caller reported Monday that Zuckerberg’s “recent shift rightward appears to be little more than window dressing, as his company’s policies still favor mass censorship.” He seems to have been courting Trump’s favor, but whatever his motivation was certainly went all-in on it. Back in January, Meta said, according to Fox News, “that it would be ending its controversial fact-checking practices and lifting restrictions on speech to ‘restore free expression’ across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have ‘gone too far.’”
Zuckerberg even complained about how Biden regime apparatchiks pressured him to censor dissidents: "During the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program," he said, "while they were trying to push that program they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly, were true. They basically pushed us and said, you know, that ‘anything saying that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’ And I was just like ‘We’re not going to do that, we’re clearly not going to do that, I mean that is kind of inarguably true." Yet he did do it, and despite his declarations from January, he is still censoring Facebook users.
Apparently Zuckerberg has now determined that he isn’t going to get into Trump’s inner circle, or no longer cares. After all, Trump’s suit against Meta, Facebook’s parent company, for banning him after the left’s fake Jan. 6 “insurrection” is over, with Meta forking over $25 million to Trump in a settlement. And so with that problem in the rearview mirror, Zuckerberg doesn’t have to try to keep up appearances anymore; the Caller reported that “Meta’s current community standards still leave the door wide open for censorship.”
Indeed. Contrary to Zuckerberg’s statement about rolling back restrictions on the entirely subjective category of “hate speech,” Facebook’s “current community standards still contain a comprehensive section instructing users not to post content which would fall under its ‘hateful conduct’ policy.” These standards still include prohibitions on “political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.'” In other words, you still can’t dissent from the left’s fantasies about men becoming women and vice versa, and don’t you dare call some clown who thinks he is a member of the opposite sex and has green hair and safety pins sticking out of his nose “weird.”
Related: DNC Meeting Doubles Down on the Crazy
Even worse, contrary to Zuckerberg’s complaints about the Biden regime pressuring Facebook to toe its COVID line, one still can’t freely express opinions on public health issues on Facebook: “Meta’s community guidelines still contain a section on ‘harmful health misinformation’ that covers non-Covid-related public health issues. The policy reads, ‘We consult with leading health organizations to identify health misinformation likely to directly contribute to imminent harm to public health and safety.’”
Remember: “misinformation” is anything the left doesn’t want you to believe or even talk about. And Meta “still has a lengthy section on ‘Misinformation.’” And so it looks as if nothing really has changed at Facebook. Once attention was elsewhere, Zuckerberg reverted to his old tricks. More’s the pity. We can only hope that as Facebook continues to demand that its users adhere to leftist positions and endorse leftist policies, more and more users will close their accounts for good. There was a time when Facebook didn’t exist. Those days could come again, and not a moment too soon.
