Meta is Rolling Back Its Censorship, But Not the Most Significant Kind

Why continuing to throttle external links stifles public discourse

Photo by Julio Lopez on Unsplash

Last week Meta announced that they were rolling back a series of measures they’ve had in place since at least the 2016 debacle of an election to prevent the spread of disinformation. As Zuckerberg says in the video announcement, they were well-intentioned measures, but they turned out to be too restrictive and censored perfectly appropriate content. Remembering the 2016 election season, I am quite sympathetic, personally. The disinformation campaigns, especially on Facebook, were horrific. But Facebook’s fact checkers just created a politicized review board. With others, I’m happy to see Meta move toward Twitter’s model of “Community Notes.” I do think newspapers and publishers need fact checkers, but social media platforms don’t. They also announced that their automated system for banning content will be dialed back to only look for the most extreme content, allowing for more “free speech.” Again, on the whole, this is a good thing. Over the last year or so I’ve seen several friends complain of innocuous posts getting banned for crossing some imaginary line. This is the problem of over-relying on AI to monitor complex content. But I also want to push back on this idea that Meta (or “X”) is really a space devoted to free speech. Although these latest moves by Meta are praiseworthy, the kind of speech they are protecting is a vapid form of speech that just happens to be profitable to Meta. If Zuckerberg or Musk were truly committed to “free speech” as they claim, they wouldn’t be throttling or hidding external links on their platforms, links to articles and sites where meaningful public discourse actually occurs.