For far too long, tech monopolies have controlled free speech and political discourse online. It’s been incredibly clear that they have regularly restricted conservative speech—whether it be as overt as silencing full media organizations for sharing the Hunter Biden laptop story or as unknown as suspending your grandmother’s Facebook account for sharing a “spicy” meme that criticizes Democrat policy.
After President Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in November, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta, announced that the company would end its “third party fact-checking program and [move] to a Community Notes model.” This follows the successful strategy for allowing free speech in online discourse that Elon Musk took with X.
Zuckerberg in his announcement further added that Meta had been “over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate, and censoring too much trivial content, and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions.”
He said that his platforms would “allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”
Although we should applaud this move from Zuckerberg and his company, it doesn’t go far enough.
It’s not hyperbole to say that many conservative voices on a Meta platform have received fact-check strikes against their accounts.
I find my personal stories of censorship ridiculous but more common than one would imagine—every conservative I know has a similar experience:
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in September 2020 during Trump’s first term, Democrats freaked out that the president would have the opportunity to replace her with someone more conservative, which he did with now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Reacting to their outrage, I tweeted the following opinion:
“Just a reminder that Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have casually retired at 80 yrs old under Obama and been replaced by an ultra-progressive in their 40s … but they chose not to.
“It’s not Republicans’ or Trump’s fault that they get the opportunity to push through a new justice.”
My opinion went viral—being posted hundreds of thousands of times on multiple platforms—when something curious happened. My opinion was “fact-checked” by third-party fact-checkers, and every screenshot of my tweet was flagged as “missing context.” USA Today had its fact-check division write an extensive piece about my opinion, even going as far as to interview law professors to “debunk” it.
This is how the Left has controlled the free flow of ideas on social media throughout the past decade—and many conservative accounts have been flagged, which limits their overall potential reach.
Both my Facebook and Instagram accounts have been flagged for sharing my opinion so many times that at one point, the now-Meta warned users not to follow me because I had posted “false information,” according to so-called independent fact-checkers.
At one point, my account was flagged for sharing “nudity or sexual content” because I shared a meme with Hunter Biden on it, was flagged for “bullying or harassment” because I posted my reply to the liberal Southern District of New York federal prosecutor who used her 14-year-old as pro-abortion propaganda, and was even flagged with a fact-check by the Australian Associated Press on a meme calling out climate change protesters as arsonists. The Australian Associated Press fact-checked said meme with an article about margarine turkey fattener.
Every account and every person who shared any of my content that was targeted by fact-checkers have the same strikes on their accounts.
Each of these actions against my accounts limited my reach and speech on all Meta platforms—and where at one point, according to their metrics, my Instagram alone reached over 55 million people per month, that reach diminished over 90%.
My accounts are just one example of thousands who have been given strikes and have been limited due to the blatant political bias of third-party fact-checkers. The loud, conservative online voices who have been restricted, muted, and deleted by the program continue to be so under Zuckerberg’s proposed changes to Meta’s platforms—and this needs to be corrected.
If Zuckerberg and the executives at Meta truly believe in free speech and open political discourse on their platforms—and if they truly believe that they have “over-enforced their rules,” then every account on all of their platforms that could potentially have fallen under that error must be given a clean slate.
If you’re serious about open political discourse, then it’s time to let everyone out of algorithm jail—and simply shifting away from your previous biased fact-checking process doesn’t solve that problem.
I want to believe that Mark Zuckerberg is genuine in his desire to correct for past mistakes, but in order truly do so, it’s the mistakes that must be corrected—not simply the enforcement mechanism.
