The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.
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Mark Zuckerberg – the Founder and CEO of Meta – made an extraordinary announcement today on behalf of the two social media giants his company controls. That announcement had many components, and all of them took direct aim at the censorship industrial complex that was created by governments and funded by neoliberal billionaires after 2016 in order to control political speech on the internet. The newly announced policy is also a bomb that was placed and then detonated at the heart of the fraudulent industry that calls itself "disinformation experts", people who have somehow proclaimed that they are uniquely able to discern truth and falsity with such authoritative dare, such certainty that their decrees must define the limits of permissible speech online by others.
Now we can and absolutely should question the motives behind Zuckerberg's announcement, and we will definitely do that.. One can also be skeptical of whether it really is as striking a blow for online free speech as it might seem, and we will, of course, express that kind of skepticism as well – not just tonight but an ongoing basis.
The speech – regardless of what follows – was extremely consequential just enough in and of itself, not just in the U.S. but internationally. Zuckerberg, who has hinted at all of this long before Trump was elected, explicitly accused disinformation experts of acting for politicized ends and thus rendering them entirely unreliable. As a result, he announced that Meta would no longer pay for or use their services to determine what speech should and should not be permitted on the platform. He also acknowledged that the censorship policies of Facebook and Instagram have become wildly excessive and even repressive and thus vowed to abandon platform-wide censorship in favor of the model used by X: of allowing the community to correct inaccurate claims while giving up those claims without censoring them.
He accused governments around the world – not only the U.S., but governments throughout Europe and in Latin America, including Brazil – of increasing their tyrannical control over the internet and vowed that Meta would no longer collaborate with these state censorship efforts. And perhaps most importantly of all, Zuckerberg recognized that it is not the role or responsibility of social media platforms, nor is it their competence, nor is it anyone else's, to determine what is true and what is false, to the point where people who decree that have the right to have their decrees honored as censorship orders. The whole point of free discourse for adults, after all, is to allow other people to debate those questions themselves freely and then decide it for themselves.
Again, there are all sorts of reasons to distrust Mark Zuckerberg and Meta but there is no question that Zuckerberg's major announcement is a reflection of the growing backlash against online censorship and the fraudulent disinformation expert industry on which it relies.
