By Riley Donovan

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement in a video released Jan. 7 that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram” is going to have far-reaching effects. Fact-checkers, whom Zuckerberg said are “too politically biased,” are now gone, to be replaced by “community notes.”

As on X , formerly Twitter, users will be able to provide collaborative input below potentially misleading posts. In addition, “content moderation” policies will be modified to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender.” Filters will scan for “illegal and high-severity violations” but lower-severity infractions will only be looked into when users file a report about them. According to Zuckerberg, this should “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”

With more than three billion active users a month, Facebook is still the world’s most popular social media platform. Instagram, another major Meta platform, has two billion active users a month. The content seen by all these users could soon begin to look very different.

This is a remarkable shift. For years, Meta has been pressured to enact more content censorship. Now, Zuckerberg has come out and said the real problem is that Meta has been censoring too much rather than too little.

This rejection of censorship comes two years after Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and removed most censorship from it. X now has 611 million active users a month. While this is much lower than Facebook or Instagram, its high concentration of journalists and political influencers, not to mention its owner’s friendship with incoming United States president Donald Trump , gives it outsized impact.

Social media is rife with speculation on whether Zuckerberg’s motivation for scrapping censorship arises from a genuine commitment to free speech or is merely an attempt to cozy up to Trump. His citing of the “cultural tipping point” of Trump’s election victory as a reason for his content moderation U-turn raises the question of whether he would have made this decision had Kamala Harris won in November.

Although interesting, this type of speculation misses the forest for the trees. The fundamental point to take from the abandonment of censorship on social media is that politically correct speech codes are being replaced by a renewed emphasis on free expression.

This reflects a broad — and welcome — shift away from woke ideology across the West. In a YouGov survey two weeks after the election, a majority of Americans said political correctness and wokeism had played an important role in it. Here in Canada, a September 2023 survey showed that 78 per cent of Canadians think “political correctness has gone too far.”