Massive MAGA Win: Facebook Reverses Its Censorship

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), made a huge announcement: Facebook is now going to be reversing its censorship policies.

This is enormous. Facebook has absolutely crushed conservative media on their platform over the course of the last several years.

We know this personally. Over at The Daily Wire, where I was the number one Facebook page on the platform in 2020 and the beginning of 2021, something happened. Something shifted.

In 2021, our impressions from my personal page, which was likely the most prominent page on Facebook, went from a whopping one billion impressions a month to less than 100 million impressions a month — a 90% reduction in impressions in reach.

That was a deliberate move by Facebook to crush political content on the platform in 2021.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg is reversing all of that.

Let’s begin with the timeline. To understand what has been unfolding over at Facebook, a broader understanding of what has been unfolding in America around the issues of free speech must first be understood.

In 2016, fundamental changes took place when Donald Trump won the presidency that year. Up until 2016, social media had widely been perceived by the Left as an overall good; social media was a way for people to network with each other, for political content to be distributed to a broader audience. In fact, the Obama 2012 campaign received all sorts of plaudits for its magical use of Facebook in getting people out to vote.

Then, Donald Trump won in 2016.

Democrats, looking for an excuse for why Trump had won, decided it couldn’t be because Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate; it couldn’t be because Democrats had become disconnected from the body politic.

It had to be that social media had allowed Trump to win.

Thus, social media had to be cudgeled into the corner. It had to be that the American populace was manipulated by outside forces, that Russian bots had manipulated the election.

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This narrative, all part of the giant Russiagate narrative, declared that the Trump team had been infiltrated by pro-Russian stooges and had been doing the work of Vladimir Putin; in return, Putin had manipulated the American body politic into electing Trump in 2016 with Facebook memes. This took the form of the Mueller investigation and the entire Russiagate nonsense that lasted for years.

But in the realm of social media and free speech, this turned into an argument for censorship and for shutting down social media dissemination of dissenting points of view. The idea from the Left was that if Facebook allowed dissenting points of view to be distributed widely, that might lead to things like Donald Trump being elected.

And that had to be stopped. Right then.

The Left likes to hide this behind the rubric of “disinformation.” Remember, they used this word all the time in 2017: Russian “disinformation,” election “disinformation.” That’s why Trump had won. Then, they started to merge that with misinformation so the attack turned against misinformation and disinformation.

But those are two very different terms. Disinformation would be a foreign power actively intervening by using false information in order to thwart the will of the people.

Conversely, misinformation is just a catch-all term for what is disliked in politics. For example, the media said Joe Biden being senile was “misinformation.” 

So the media started to lump both terms together. Anything the legacy media didn’t like had to be shut down.

This was also a business proposition for the legacy media as well as a political proposition, because they did not want people like Trump to win.

It was a business proposition because Facebook and social media allowed start-up enterprises like The Daily Wire to actually thrive. We were able to market ourselves on Facebook. We were able to become a prominent and powerful company because we were able to reach people through mechanisms that the legacy media did not control.

That’s what social media was for. So the legacy media and Democrats combined to crack down on social media outlets like Facebook and X (then Twitter), until Elon Musk bought Twitter.

In 2017, California senator Dianne Feinstein and the Democrats held hearings berating members of the social media hierarchy and told them they needed to crack down on “disinformation.” If they didn’t, the government would. The pressure campaign from the government began as soon as Donald Trump was elected in 2016. 

The goal was to shut down dissenting points of view. It wasn’t about Russia. It was never about Russian disinformation. The supposedly effective Russian efforts over the course of the entire 2016 election cycle reached roughly 126 million people. That sounds like a large number until compared with my personal Facebook page, which was reaching a billion people every single month. So, the Russian numbers weren’t big over the course of an entire election cycle.

It was never about that. It was always about censorship.

In 2019, Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown in which he stood up for free speech in what I thought were useful, productive, and strong ways. In it, he said: 

Today, we are in another time of social tension. We face real issues that will take a long time to work through — massive economic transitions from globalization and technology, fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, and polarized reactions to greater migration. Many of our issues flow downstream from these changes.

In the face of these tensions, once again a popular impulse is to pull back from free expression. We’re at another cross-roads. We can either continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression. 

He was right then. He was right in 2019. We praised him on the show for it in 2019. Zuckerberg in 2019 sounds like Elon Musk today.

And then something happened.

In 2020, Trump was up for reelection and several events coincided. One, the COVID pandemic. And the government started to tell social media it needed to shut down “misinformation” about the pandemic. That “misinformation” ranged from actual false data to things that were patently true, like the fact that the vaccine did not prevent transmission, which was true.

For example, the Wuhan virus theory, which asserted COVID came from a lab, was shut down. It was shut down by social media at the behest of the government, all the way up through the election when the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was deliberately buried by, for instance, Facebook.

So the social media companies were under serious pressure all through 2020, and they kept exerting more and more pressure in 2020, shutting down particular modes of communication on everything from transgenderism to Black Lives Matter, from immigration to COVID.

In 2022, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook took action at the behest of the federal government to shut down dissemination of certain types of information.

Later, Zuckerberg would admit that there was actually tremendous pressure in 2020 and 2021; that pressure only ratcheted up in 2021. So after January 6, 2021, the Left and the media decided they were going to ratchet up the pressure on Facebook and social media even more.

The idea was that Facebook had been responsible for January 6.

Any time something happens that the Left doesn’t like, they blame the mechanism of distribution because what they are after is: control of the mechanism of distribution. Always and forever, it’s about power. It is never about principle. It is always about power.

If something goes wrong, find the thing you want to take over. You blame the people in charge of that thing. Then, you suggest that you should be in charge of that thing. By the time January 6 happened, there were posts nearly every day from people on the Left, on various social media outlets and at The New York Times, lamenting the fact we had such wide distribution at The Daily Wire.

This led to members of the Biden White House actively stumping to reduce our traffic on Facebook. As The Daily Wire reported:

Shortly after taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration pressured Facebook to stifle The Daily Wire’s reach on the platform and boost the reach of legacy media outlets, according to meeting notes recently turned over to Congress.

The newly released documents, which were reviewed by The Daily Wire, show that Facebook repeatedly confirmed to the White House that it was working to re-engineer its platform in order to accomplish the administration’s directives on suppressing content that clashed with its COVID vaccine agenda.

The meeting notes, first reported by Just The News, detail discussions then-White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty had with Facebook executives in 2021 where the Biden staffer pressured the Big Tech company to moderate content related to COVID vaccines in order to enforce the administration’s policy goals. During one meeting on April 14, 2021, Flaherty asked Facebook about “chang[ing] the algorithm” to push content from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal over news from The Daily Wire and other “polarizing” entities. 

“If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people. You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” Flaherty asked Facebook employees in a conversation about changing Americans’ attitudes about COVID vaccines, according to typed notes from the meeting.

We had way more legs, way more clicks, way more reactions than The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, everyone. That is why the White House was targeting us.

Basically, in response to our success on Facebook and under pressure from the White House, Facebook decided to completely shift their entire take on political media.

They decided to shut down the dissemination of political media on Facebook, and we could see it in the statistics. We had to change our entire business model to adjust for the fact that Facebook had done this.

All of this was designed to benefit legacy media, because if the alternatives to legacy media are shut down, the only thing left is legacy media. If you engage in false fact checks of people and entities like The Daily Wire while ignoring all of the lies that are told by CNN or The New York Times, if you decide you’re going to downgrade all political content (any viral political content on Facebook), you end up benefiting the consolidated big guys at the expense of the upstart little guys. It is effectively a government-controlled monopoly and oligopoly at that point.

In 2024, that is precisely what Zuckerberg recognized. He sent a letter to the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee dated August 26, in which Zuckerberg said he regretted not speaking up about the pressure that he felt from the White House.

Now, Donald Trump has won reelection. And because Trump has won, the tides have turned.

There are two ways to view this. One is that Facebook is riding the winds of whatever is popular — that if Democrats get elected, the censorship will go right back into place. And that’s a possibility. The other way to read this is that Zuckerberg, even when Democrats were in control of Congress in 2019, was pushing for free speech.

It was only when Democrats had full control of the government that they were able to cudgel Facebook into doing what they wanted. Now that they no longer have control, Facebook can finally let up and allow people to see the content they wanted to see.

With Trump elected, free speech can bloom once again, which says something about where the Left is in this country. They do not like free speech. Zuckerberg acknowledges that everyone knows this. The reason there is a new wind across America is because Trump was elected. The American people are tired of the censorship regime.

Zuckerberg said on Tuesday, “We’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X. … The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”

We’ve been yelling this from the rooftops for years, that news fact-checking organizations are opinion organizations of the Left. This is true for all of them. This is true for The Washington Post, FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact. They were all clearly biased to the Left in two ways. One, in their selection bias, the things they chose to backtrack, and two, in how they fact-checked those things. If Joe Biden told a lie, it wasn’t a lie; it was a “misspeak.” If Donald Trump said something that was too broad and generally true but he made a mistake, then the whole thing was regarded as a giant lie.

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That is the way the fact checkers did their work. This was wrapped into broader conversations about censorship. GARM (the Global Alliance for Responsible Media), for example, was designed as a “fact-checking organization” utilized to downgrade particular outlets. We, along with Elon Musk and the House Judiciary Committee, helped dismantle GARM. Similarly, Newsguard, an organization specifically designed to “rate news outlets” benefited the Left at the expense of the Right. Invariably, those outlets were used by Facebook and the like as “fact-checkers” to determine what deserved to see the light of day and what didn’t.

These fact checkers were totally full of crap. They’ve been full of crap for years. We have been screaming this from the rooftops. They determined social media policy and how users could access information. 

So implementing community notes is move number one. That is correct. It should’ve been done years ago.

Move number two: Zuckerberg said, “We’re going to 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 be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”

He acknowledged there are certain issues that Facebook has shut down discussion of. We’ve had to look at all of our content very thoroughly just to keep from having our pages banned. Making a statement like “men are not women” on Facebook would put you in danger for years on end. If you said mass migration by radical Muslims into the West was a threat, you would be downgraded.

The third change over at Facebook: “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 going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. And for lower severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.”

The point that he is making is that the filters were set in order to exclude particular content. So, presumably, if you subscribe to the Ben Shapiro page at Facebook, you will be allowed to see content from Ben Shapiro.

They had, without your permission, demoted political content in your feed using these filters. That is why the traffic dropped. It is why you stopped seeing certain people. Tons of people on the Right just disappeared from your feed.

Fourth: “We’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”

That is a method of allowing you to see the politics you wanted to see in the first place.

Finally, Zuckerberg said:

We’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our USB 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. … We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. 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 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.

Those last couple of points are unbelievable. Moving the content moderation teams from San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San Jose, a bunch of labs, over to Texas — where presumably you’ll have a broader panoply of people who actually know the rest of America — is a very good thing.

But the last point is the telling one. This is how bad the Biden administration has been. This is how bad Democrats are all across the world: Censorship regimes are common, de rigueur. This is true in Europe. This is why if someone posts the wrong thing in Britain, they will go to jail for longer than a rapist. This is why, in Canada, a person could theoretically risk jail if they say the wrong thing politically. 

It turns out the United States is unique in its pursuit of free speech. 

Zuckerberg is saying that during the Biden administration, they engaged in precisely the same sorts of pressure tactics that countries around the world engage in. The Biden administration took its lead from censorship regimes in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. They did not take the lead in free speech.

President Trump is going to do the opposite. He’s going to push for free speech instead of allowing Europe to set censorship rules on all of these companies that operate inside the United States.

Companies that operate multi-nationally, the way that obviously Facebook does, have to set standards for every single different country. Facebook had sided with the European standards.

With Trump in office, the American exceptionalist idea of free speech should be purveyed everywhere, and the U.S. government should use its weight in order to make sure that it can be purveyed in other places.

This idea of a broader free speech movement cannot be a temporary change just for purposes of pleasing President Trump.

A commitment to free speech by social media needs to last longer than whoever is in the office.