Zuckerberg’s public apology

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Its global reach is hard to comprehend. Facebook alone has more than 3 billion monthly active users and more than 2 billion daily active users Facebook Messenger has 979 million monthly active users WhatsApp has more than 2 billion monthly active users and supports more than 100 billion messages a day Instagram has more than 2 billion monthly active users That's why Meta's policies are so important. In the past, its platforms have been used to influence elections, censor, ban, and suppress scientific research, scientists, and politicians (including a sitting president), and impress political ideology on a global population (most heavily felt in the U.S.). The newfound principles and "confessions" that Zuckerberg shared are profound and represent a seismic cultural shift for the company, and perhaps for the country. And because of Meta's largess in the tech community, there will be ripple effects. Zuckerberg framed his announcements like so…

The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.

To do that, Meta will: "Get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S." Zuckerberg went further by explaining, " The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created." Here are more bullets from Zuckerberg: "We're gonna simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to become more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far." "We're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we're gonna focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations." "We're bringing back civic content." "We're gonna move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams." And the real kicker: "We're gonna work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more." Zuckerberg went further to explain…

Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government.

And then, he said the quiet part out loud. A Profoundly Positive Development This quote from Zuckerberg is particularly telling:

That's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.

Whether Zuckerberg is acting purely out of self-preservation after what he and his company have done… Whether he himself has felt censored to share his real opinion over the last several years… Whether he has become based (i.e. true to oneself and one's beliefs)… It doesn't really matter. It's an apology to the American public. It's acknowledging and attempting to right a past wrong. And it's setting the record straight. As the CEO of Meta, this is exactly what he should have done. He has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of the shareholders and to protect Meta, he needed to step up, admit that what was done was wrong, and demonstrate clearly how Meta would improve. He even went so far as to acknowledge the success of X's approach using Community Notes to battle false information. That was the right thing to do. Most of the tech community is thrilled with this announcement. To Zuckerberg's point, censorship makes it difficult to innovate. Censorship and the suppression of a constitutional right – freedom of speech – decelerates advancement. It always results in suboptimal outcomes, and it leads to societal chaos and division. The free flow of ideas is what accelerates the advancement of society. It is the only way to solve problems quickly and get to a world of abundance. The alternative is a dystopian nightmare. Jeff Brown