Facebook Embraces Free Speech: The Masses Win, the Experts Lose!

Michael Barone on Jan 10, 2025

The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps eternal battle between the experts and the masses has been shifting starkly, even wildly, with the former losing and the latter gaining clout.

That's been most visible in the series of announcements and selfies emanating from the gaudy precincts of Mar-a-Lago. The experts like to scoff at what they consider a poor man's idea of how a rich man lives. Those more attuned to the masses can respond that the compound was built with money made from sales of breakfast cereal.

The most striking shift came this week on Tuesday, and not from Mar-a-Lago or snowbound Washington but from Silicon Valley, from a tech titan wearing an elbow-length sweater, a gold chain, and a watch supposedly worth $900,000, the proprietor of Meta and Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Previously, Zuckerberg has been on the side of the experts and their efforts to control information available to the masses. After the 2016 election, prompted by the complaints of liberal elites that "misinformation" had somehow been responsible for the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump, Zuckerberg hired so-called fact-checking organizations to place limits on the information Facebook would transmit.

Acting on the conclusions of its "fact-checkers," Facebook cooperated in the widespread suppression, by old media and new, of the information revealed by the New York Post about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.

Facebook also, as I wrote in 2021, actively suppressed articles and arguments that the virus that causes COVID-19 came from a lab leak in China, though it let up on its efforts when the Biden White House ordered an investigation of the lab leak hypothesis.

By that time, it was embarrassingly obvious that Facebook was doing the bidding of the Democratic Party and of experts in and out of government, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and cooperating scientists. Rather than aiding the free flow of information, Facebook was suppressing truths embarrassing to experts and elites.

In his statement this week, Zuckerberg suggested that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. "We've reached a point where there's just too many mistakes and too much censorship," he admitted. He promised to go back to -- wait for it -- "restoring free speech on our platforms."

And give him credit for some actual steps. "We're going to get rid of the fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X." No wonder free market economist Alex Tabarrok posted, "Elon buying Twitter is saving the world."

"The fact-checkers," Zuckerberg went on, "have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created." Like self-appointed experts everywhere, from macroeconomists who underestimated inflation and public health bureaucrats who required children at summer camps to wear masks, they're getting the back of the public's hand.

Or moving orders. The new "content moderation team" will be moved from California to Texas to "help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." Translation: You can count on fairer judgments from people in a 56%-42% Trump state than from those in the San Francisco Bay area that voted 72%-25% for Vice President Kamala Harris. The masses are fairer than the experts.

Finally, the tech mogul who gave hundreds of millions to spur voter turnout in Democratic constituencies in 2020 promises to "work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world" that are "pushing to censor more." Which has been difficult, he adds, during the Biden years "when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship."

Perhaps we are watching just an opportunistic switch from the man whose firm, I wrote in 2021, was "the most effective suppressor of speech in American history." And we shouldn't forget that Trump is threatening free speech himself by, for example, suing Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for what turned out to be an inaccurate late-campaign poll.

The interesting switch here is that the voters who are most educated and, in so many cases, proud of what they consider their high-mindedness have been the most eager supporters of suppressing "misinformation" -- and that over the past dozen years, so much of that "misinformation" has turned out to be true.

Upscale liberals in this generation have seemed habitually risk averse, eager to impose on the masses COVID-19 restrictions that provided little protection but caused much damage or environmental mandates, such as electric vehicle subsidies, which reduce carbon emission mildly, if at all, but threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands.

Such severe risk aversion is in obvious tension with the daring and creativity of tech pioneers such as Zuckerberg and Elon Musk -- and with the instincts of the masses, who are willing to make sacrifices for good cause but resent being lied to and denied the truth by experts who deem themselves their fellow citizens' mental and moral superiors.

"Paradigm shift," The Washington Post's Jason Willick concludes. Let's see if it sticks.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.