Social media bosses are suddenly all for free speech, but can we take their enthusiasm at face value?
Fake news about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was widely shared on the internet, including on his own social networks, after he first publicly came out against fact-checking by social media companies in 2020.
The Guardian
Free speech is in permacrisis – or so some would have you believe. Complaints that freedom of speech is under attack come mostly from the political right, from public figures who appear to the naked eye to be extremely free to say and do what they like, and see no irony in doing so via platforms with vast audiences.
These vigorous defenders of free speech also often have a curiously narrow set of interests over which they wish to exercise it. Far from the noble anti-authoritarian roots of the British liberal tradition, these figures – Nigel Farage, for example – prefer to use their platforms to punch down, often against already persecuted minority groups. Rather than wanting freer speech, what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of broadcasting their views. What the right calls cancel culture, philosopher Arianne Shahvisi writes, “is often just the supersized celebrity version of what the rest of us experience all the time: consequences for our mistakes and bigotries. You do something shitty and people distance themselves from you, especially if you refuse to acknowledge your wrongdoing and make amends.”
Our techno-libertarian overlords have recently decided to make speech freer. Meta, owner of the world’s biggest social media platform, announced earlier this year that it would dispense with factchecking for its 3 billion users on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg described the move as “restoring free expression”. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, now X, he sacked 80% of engineers dedicated to trust and safety on the platform, resulting in what has been described as “a deluge of misinformation and toxic discourse”. X has now haemorrhaged millions of users in a continuing exodus to more decent places on the internet. Following Meta’s announcement, on the other hand, a flurry of decidedly fact-free memes have sought to point out the folly of the new policy, some more trenchantly than others. “Facebook Founder and Convicted Pedophile Mark Zuckerberg, Dead at 36, Says Social Media Sites Should Not Fact-Check Posts”, is one example. See what they did there?
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