‘Huge Win for Free Speech’: Republicans Cheer Facebook’s Retreat from Censorship

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Conservatives commended Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for curtailing his company’s longstanding practice of censoring political speech.

Facebook, which has previously been pressured by the Biden administration to engage in censorship, will end its fact-checking program, replacing it with a Community Notes approach; offer a more personalized approach to political content; and eliminate some content policies around hot-button issues, refocusing its automated moderation systems on “high severity violations.”

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg announced Tuesday. “More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”

Users on X immediately cheered Zuckerberg for changing his company’s direction towards free speech.

“The future of free speech online is looking better than it has in a long time,” Charlie Kirk posted. “Time will tell how successful Zuckerberg will be in implementing some of these changes, but these are bold steps in the right direction and we should hope for their success.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted: “@Meta finally admits to censoring speech…what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech.”

X account DC Draino said Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a catalyst in restoring free speech.

“Elon didn’t just spend $44 billion to save free speech on X,” he posted on X. “He’s saving free speech on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads too, and Meta is worth over $1.5 Trillion I’d say Elon made a pretty good deal.”

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, heralded Facebook’s new direction as a “retreat from political censorship”:

GREAT NEWS: Facebook/@Meta announces support for more free speech — will retreat from political censorship! @META is: Ending our third party fact-checking program that allowed leftists to censor conservative speech and moving to a Community Notes model based on @ElonMusk‘s @X; Changing content policies to remove some restrictions and allow more room for debate and discussion on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender issues; Simplify our systems to reduce over enforcement and cut down on mistakes, by focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations like terrorism, drugs and frauds and scams; and Going to start phasing civic content back in with a more personalized approach and control so that people that want to see more political content in their feeds can do so.

Not all conservatives praised Zuckerberg. Some raised concerns that the changes were due to the incoming Trump administration.

“Now that President Trump is about to take office, Meta has allegedly decided to stop censoring conservatives,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn said. “This is a ploy to avoid being regulated. We will not be fooled.”