Meta's 'Fact-Checking' Decision Is a Win for All Americans | Opinion

To liberal ideologues and Democratic partisans, Mark Zuckerberg is, as the anti-Trump website The Bulwark put it, "a surrender monkey." They see his decision to end Meta's third-party "fact-checking" program as just the latest example of cynical big-business types trying to make peace with president-elect Donald Trump because they fear his wrath.

Non-leftists see it differently. They view Zuckerberg's move, similar to signals from some corporate media publishers like Jeff Bezos, as an indication that such people understand that it is in their interests to move to the center.

But both explanations can be correct.

Zuckerberg's and Bezos's only allegiance is to the cause of expanding their fortunes, which already number in the hundreds of billions. They are acting cynically, but also listening to the verdict of the people.

They have finally realized that allowing their enormously powerful platforms to be steered by the ideological Left was an error. On issues like gender ideology, illegal immigration, and COVID-19—not to mention the obsession with delegitimizing Trump and covering up for the corruption and diminished mental capacity of President Joe Biden—Meta and the rest of Big Tech were out of touch with most Americans.

Moreover, their willingness to censor opposing views under the guise of halting the flow of "misinformation" was not only wrong; it's obviously bad for business in a country whose voters just handed unified control of Washington to Republicans this past November.

Yet the end of Facebook's censorship regime and its adoption of a system of "community notes," which will provide a check on blatantly wrong or hateful posts in the same manner as X (formerly Twitter), owned by Elon Musk, signifies more than a desire to stay in the political mainstream. It's a seminal victory for free speech.

The owners of the virtual public square, who have more power than media moguls of the past could ever have dreamed of possessing, have been putting their fingers on the scale to advance a specific set of ideological agendas, as well as the fortunes of Democrats.

Their suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and his family's corruption in the last weeks of the 2020 presidential election is one of the most shocking scandals in recent political memory, perhaps only rivaled by their equal enthusiasm for covering up Biden's mental decline.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifies during the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis" in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024. ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP/Getty Images

Even worse was their collusion with the Biden administration to shut down dissenting views about COVID policies, some of which proved to be more truthful than the claims of government officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who claimed to speak for "science." That collusion seemed to herald a new era in which First Amendment rights to freedom of speech would be overridden by the government's assertion to a duty to silence "misinformation," a category of thought which suspiciously overlapped with much of conservative discourse.

The "fact-checkers" employed by Facebook are thinly disguised partisans who are as likely to be guilty of spreading "misinformation" as the sources they have helped to censor.

Their efforts also dovetailed with the censorious culture driven by the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that shut down debate on college campuses, cultural forums, and even journalistic outlets. And since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, social media bias also helped enable and mainstream the unprecedented wave of antisemitism that has swept across the United States.

It all combined to create what writer Ben Weingarten has rightly dubbed the "disinformation industrial complex": an alliance of partisan activists, government agencies, corporate media, and Big Tech companies waging an ideological war on Trump, conservative ideas, and dissent against woke ideologies.

Revulsion against these repressive practices played a role in the 2024 campaign. Trump rode a wave of dissatisfaction with woke conformity and the contempt of the credentialed elites for traditional American values and the interests of working-class voters to victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump's supporters hope that the president-elect will direct the Department of Justice to combat DEI rather than to enforce it. Whatever one thinks of Trump, if he has moved the needle sufficiently to persuade the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and as well as corporate media to stop colluding with the Left to promote censorship, that's a victory for American democracy.

There's little doubt that shutting down Meta's censorship operation will make it easier for all sorts of haters to spread their bile on Facebook. That's why liberal groups that purport to defend civil liberties against extremism and antisemitism not only support more internet censorship but also have colluded in it.

But the notion that in 2025 the real threat to democracy comes from the sort of marginal neo-Nazi Facebook posters that liberal groups have been obsessing about for the last several years is risible. This is a moment in history when the primary threat is from the powerful leftist ideologues carrying out censorship. They are more likely to be shutting down pro-Trump conservatives and others who dissent from liberal orthodoxies—such as those who oppose so-called anti-racists' hatred for Jews and Israel—than the lunatic fringe.

By contesting the end of censorship on Facebook, liberals may claim that they are merely fighting neo-Nazis and other hate-mongers or defending innocent Americans from false information. But whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they are actually putting themselves on the wrong side of the battle against leftist authoritarianism and antisemitism, as well as outside of the sensible center of American society.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.