Writing for spiked, Tom Slater questions Zuckerberg’s recent mea culpa, critiquing the hypocrisy of Big Tech’s Covid climbdown.
Slater begins, “The big misconception about Big Tech censorship is that all the deplatforming, shadow banning and unpersoning we’ve seen on the major platforms in recent years is all part of some nefarious plot – that the oligarchs presiding over Facebook, Twitter et al were always desperate to seize control of the information sphere in order to bend it to their own political will. There’s a bit of that going on – certainly from the lower-ranking, blue-haired nerds who go into open revolt from time to time because their bosses refuse to tighten the screws even further. But a lot of the tech bros are just weak-kneed, unprincipled capitalists, terrified of bad PR, keen to protect their mega-wealth, willing to bend to any cultural-elite edict and lacking any discernible principles to stop them.
“Take Mark Zuckerberg – the CEO of Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram. Despite presiding over a growing empire of censorship over the past decade, he’s very suddenly had a change of heart. He’s just issued a semi-apology, bashing the outgoing Biden administration for essentially forcing him to muzzle his users. In a letter addressed to US Republican congressman Jim Jordan, who has been leading a congressional investigation into Big Tech censorship, Zuckerberg says the Joe Biden White House ‘repeatedly pressured’ Meta to censor dissenting content about Covid-19, including satire and humour. ‘I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it’, Zuckerberg writes. ‘I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Call me a cynic, but if he really feels this strongly about it you’d think he would have spoken out a little sooner, before Biden had one slipper out of the Oval Office door. Of course, it’s absolutely true that Joe Biden and the Democrats heaped pressure on Facebook and others to suppress any pesky dissent to their increasingly tyrannical Covid measures. Biden threatened them with ‘antitrust’ proceedings and revoking their Section 230 privileges – a law which ensures tech firms are not generally liable for what their users post. In July 2021, Biden went so far as to accuse Facebook of ‘killing people’, while his surgeon general called for ‘legal and regulatory measures’ to tackle online ‘misinformation’. This was an outrageous attempt to browbeat the private sector into doing the government’s censorship for it.”
After outlining Facebooks earlier attempts to do the state’s bidding, Slater concludes, “What should we make of Zuckerberg’s mea culpa? It’s not a principled change of heart, that’s for sure. And those hoping his letter will soon translate into a rolling back of Facebook’s dizzying array of existing speech codes will probably be waiting for a very long time. Perhaps he just fears which way the wind is blowing. Following the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France and Keir Starmer’s and the EU’s sabre-rattling against Elon Musk’s X, Western governments appear to be swapping the carrot and stick for a baseball bat when it comes to encouraging social-media firms to censor. Perhaps Zuck has realised that nothing he does will ever be good enough for them. All I can say for certain is that allowing vast swathes of the digital public square to become the sole property of a handful of weird, easily influenced billionaires was a truly terrible idea.”
Full story available below.
For more information on Zuckerberg’s regrets over censoring Facebook and Instagram click here.
