Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced early last week that fact-checking and content moderation on Facebook and Instagram would be decimated in a bid to return the platforms to their “free speech roots”.
You’d have to be stunningly naïve to believe that the tech overlords of our day — Zuckerberg and Elon Musk — happen also to be upstanding champions of this critical civic virtue and key human right.
But as Musk looks to promote authoritarian political forces around the globe and calls on King Charles to dissolve the British parliament, apparently unaware that things have moved on since the time of Henry VIII, Zuckerberg may well calculate that we live in so credulous an age that we’ll buy his claim that Meta’s slashing of internal controls will allow it to work with incoming US President Donald Trump to protect “free expression worldwide”.
Of course, Zuckerberg is not motivated by any genuine desire for free expression — that’s evident when he says Meta will be working with Trump to “push back on global governments around the world going after American companies and pushing them to censor them”.
Rather, it’s a craven effort at ingratiating Meta with the incoming administration and capitulation to threats Trump has issued against Meta.
Moreover, Zuckerberg’s record makes it laughable that he should position himself as a free speech warrior. According to a New York Times report, following Zuckerberg’s announcement, upset employees posting about the changes on internal message boards found their posts quickly removed.
On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Meta, before Zuckerberg’s announcement, had been exempting its top advertisers from its content moderation policies, effectively granting high spenders a protection not offered to ordinary users.
A free-speech sphere in which the rich are granted far greater protections and latitude than others sounds much the same as a concept of free speech which holds US companies to be the chief beneficiaries of that right.
If Zuckerberg’s commitment to free expression has been entirely contradictory and self-serving, he’s also failing to appreciate (perhaps deliberately) just what free expression is.
Here, it is worth stepping back from the superficiality and emaciated versions of freedom of expression that the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk offer us — for them, it’s a freedom which serves, above all, unprecedentedly powerful corporations — and ask ourselves a fundamental question: why does freedom of expression matter?
It matters principally for four reasons:
- It allows us to realise our fullest human selves;
- It enables us to find the truth;
- It is necessary for good government; and
- It allows us to live with and amid diversity.
The first reason indicates that the freedom is an end in itself — by expressing ourselves, our different thoughts and views, we mark ourselves as human.
Means to an end
The latter three reasons imply that freedom of expression is a means to an end — that we value this freedom so that we might get at the truth, realise better government and live in peace alongside each other.
Freedom of expression framed within these last three desired outcomes is not boundless: deliberate lies, incitement to harm and hate speech — especially if engaged in by more powerful or overwhelming actors (although admittedly still forms of expression) — will subvert rather than advance the outcomes we seek.
Even in the case of freedom of expression as the realisation of our fullest human selves, this is an exercise we undertake not in isolation but in relation to other people.
Framed in this way, freedom of expression is also not limitless – my right must be commensurate with other persons’ entirely equal claim to expression.
None of these conceptions of free expression implies a vacuum of moderation and regulation — even if these processes hold their own dangers to free expression.
Zuckerberg claims that discarding fact-checking and content moderation processes will allow Meta to do better battle with censorship and that the initial adoption of these processes was a concession to censorship, and so an infringement on free expression.
But anti-censorship initiatives have never been about securing special privileges for large, monopoly-like corporations or powerful political figures.
It is also to ignore, as Princeton academic Dr Zeynep Tufekci has written, “that the most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out.
“They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fuelled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.”
Whatever else we might think of the explosion of dangerous disinformation and hate speech that will inevitably take hold on Meta’s platforms, let’s be unambiguously clear: that’s not free speech. Rather, it is a strangulation. DM