Has Mark Zuckerberg genuinely rediscovered the value of free speech?

The big tech mogul is scrapping politically-biased ‘fact-checkers’ on Facebook and Instagram. Does it matter if his reasons are cynical?

There’s a song by Dar Williams called ‘Play the Greed’ about how the selfishness of corporations can effect positive change. The first verse makes the point far more evocatively than I could:

‘I finally learned that the market’s righteous holler
Comes from a pale face on a paper dollar,
And I bet ya got few bucks in your hemp wallet,
So throw a tiny wrench in the fibre optic wires.
Morals are cheap and you can be the buyers.
We can let ’em poison and pillage foreign lands
Or we can play the greed right into our hands.

If the fashion changes, Williams implies, the avarice of multi-billion-dollar corporations will ensure that they follow. Even if their intentions are simply to bleed the world of its resources to enrich their own pockets, the outcomes might still be positive from time to time.

I could not help but think of this song while watching Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement yesterday that he was changing the policies of Facebook and Instagram in order to reclaim the principle of freedom of speech. Having permitted censorship on his platform for so long, with completely reasonable points of view being stifled for political and ideological reasons, has he now experienced that Damascene conversion? Does it even matter?

The changes Zuckerberg is proposing are considerable. He has said that he wants to dispense with the politically partisan ‘fact-checkers’ who have exploited their roles to enforce the new orthodoxy. For many years now, the Overton Window of acceptable opinions has been determined by a handful of affluent young Silicon Valley tech employees. The extent of their collective hubris was such that they genuinely seemed to believe it was their job to police the opinions of the world. To help redress this political bias, Zuckerberg is now moving the headquarters of his company Meta from California to Texas.

And there’s more. He has decided to lift restrictions on contentious topics, which means that feminists who want to point out that women’s rights can only be maintained if we acknowledge the reality of biological sex differences will no longer find themselves censored. I have no doubt that future generations will find it baffling in the extreme that participation in social media was once contingent on avoiding the declaration of incontestable facts.