There’s trouble at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta as the company’s employees lost their marbles over free speech reforms.
Left-leaning Meta employees reportedly had meltdowns after President Donald Trump took office in January and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an overhaul of his platforms’ censorship policies, according to a June 19 Financial Times article. Citing dozens of unnamed sources, the outlet claimed, “Liberal-leaning employees who had worked to bolster content guardrails or project the company as ‘positive’ for democracy, were left reeling.” Yet Meta platforms continue to target free speech, as MRC’s unique CensorTrack database shows.
Some employees accused Zuckerberg of specifically making a play to please Trump, who has prioritized free speech since his day-one executive order. The Financial Times seemed to perpetuate this claim, asserting that “[t]he Trump transition team was notified privately in advance of the changes becoming public, according to people familiar with the matter.”
The Financial Times also referred to Meta’s new global affairs chief, Joel Kaplan, as a former Republican “operative” and called Meta board member and Zuckerberg advisor Marc Andreessen a “Trump acolyte.” The outlet even added that “[w]hen it comes to relaxing moderation efforts or other overtures to Trump, one former staffer said: ‘They’re going to tell him to go faster and [be] more aggressive.’”
Meta employees whined to the Financial Times that they were pressured to defend Meta's move away from harsh censorship, which they claimed was a “betrayal” of social justice that left them “grieving.”
Despite the hyperbolic criticism of free speech, however, Meta still has a long way to go in rejecting biased censorship. In fact, Tech Crunch recently cited complaints of erroneous mass bans on Instagram, Facebook and Facebook Groups, but Meta claimed to be addressing the problem.
CensorTrack also reveals ongoing censorship trends. OIn June 25, Mark Changizi posted a peer-reviewed publication on Facebook about the wide variety of harms caused by face masks, which Facebook removed under the accusation of “physical harm.” On June 2, Facebook rejected Vision Israel’s Holocaust exhibit ad before claiming it was a “mistake.” In May, Facebook blocked an ad boost on a patriotic, explicitly Christian Memorial Day post.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
