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On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a social media video that both Facebook and Instagram will make big changes in the direction of prioritizing free speech and reducing censorship.

In the video, Zuckerberg vowed to be a longtime supporter of freedom of speech but said that both the government and the legacy media’s demands for more censorship have impacted the platform. He admitted that the pressure to censor content was heavily fueled by politics but that it’s also no lie to say that the internet is rife with “bad stuff,” like “drugs, terrorism, [and] child exploitation.”

In an effort to mitigate this “bad stuff” circulating in cyberspace, Meta created and implemented a lot of “complex systems.” According to Zuckerberg, those systems made “mistakes” by accidentally censoring and deplatforming innocent people.

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he admitted, adding that the recent election was also “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing free speech.”

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he pledged.

The path to Meta’s restoration of free speech, he explained, would involve a six-part plan:

1. Ditching “politically biased” fact-checkers and adopting a community notes system similar to that of Musk’s X.

2. Lifting certain content restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender.

3. Changing the way Meta enforces its policies so that filters scan for “illegal and high-severity violations,” while lower-severity violations will be up to users to report.

4. Bringing back “civic content,” as this new era of social media users “[wants] to see this content.”

5. Moving Meta’s Trust and Safety and Content Moderation team out of California, where political bias is strong, and moving the U.S.-based content review to Texas.

6. Working with President Trump to “push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

Zuckerberg then praised the United States for being the country with the “strongest constitutional protections for free speech” and critiqued Europe for “institutionalizing censorship,” Latin American countries for their “secret courts” that thwart freedom of speech, and China for censoring apps.

The Meta CEO concluded by reflecting on how difficult it’s been to protect free speech when the U.S. government has been pushing for more censorship and expressed his excitement about “getting back to [Meta’s] roots about giving people voice.”

This video, along with the announcement that UFC president and CEO Dana White will be joining Meta’s board, has sent shock waves across the country and beyond. The plans Zuckerberg outlined are a radical shift from the heavy censorship and political bias that has defined Meta for roughly a decade now.

Has Zuckerberg seen the light and experienced a change of heart? Or is something else responsible for igniting this dramatic change?


Steve Deace and his panel discuss the possibilities.



Co-host Aaron McIntire, who initially thought the video was a deep fake, calls Zuckerberg’s words “catnip for right-wingers” and contends that we need to “see how it plays out.”

However, granted “Meta donated a million dollars to President Trump’s inauguration fund” and then “[appointed] Dana White to the board,” McIntire can’t help but wonder if this is all just “political patronage.”

Fellow co-host Todd Erzen shares McIntire’s sentiments — “I am very conflicted,” he says, explaining that while Zuckerberg’s plan is a “very, very good thing,” we can’t ignore “what he has done.”

“This might be the fakest news I’ve ever seen,” he tells Deace and McIntire, arguing that Zuckerberg lacks the “sackcloth and ashes” and “Old Testament” lamentation such an admission requires.

As for the CEO’s claim that the “complex systems” Meta implemented to regulate content made accidental “mistakes,” Erzen debunks it with one line — “They always make mistakes in our direction!”

In other words, leftist content was never censored, even the most radical kinds, meaning Zuckerberg’s “mistakes” excuse is a lie.

Deace agrees that Zuckerberg’s promises don’t cut it — “This is not sufficient atonement for Mark Zuckerberg,” he says.

“He’s admitting the largest aggregator of content in America – Facebook — was engaged in open censorship. … He’s also admitting that it was at the behest of the U.S. government, which is a clear constitutional violation,” he says.

Deace then explains how people like him have been forced by Facebook more than any other platform to choose between making money and speaking freely. To speak freely on Facebook results in one of two things — outright banning or shadow banning, both of which result in loss of income for the creator.

He suggests that if Zuckerberg is really contrite, he could prove it by funding “a class action lawsuit against the United States government for demanding [his] company censor you.”

To hear more of the team’s commentary on Zuckerberg’s change of course and their past experiences with Facebook censorship, watch the episode above.

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