Mark Zuckerberg is waging a charm offensive.
His company, Meta, just agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit that President Donald Trump filed back in 2021 after being suspended by Facebook and Instagram.
The settlement comes on the heels of Zuckerberg’s attendance at Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Meta’s purported shift away from DEI, and an earlier announcement that the company is rolling back independent fact-checking and taking steps to reduce errors in its content moderation systems.
Zuckerberg’s sudden pivot is a welcome change. He says that he wants to return Meta “to [its] roots around free expression.” But his past track record of broken promises is cause for deep suspicion.
During the first Trump presidency, when Meta (then Facebook) faced backlash for biased censorship, Zuckerberg told a Georgetown University audience in October of 2019 that “we must continue to stand for free expression” and that in “democracy … people should decide what is credible, not tech companies … .”
A year later in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, Zuckerberg went back on his word.
Facebook colluded with the FBI to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story—on the spurious grounds that the story was the result of a Russian “hack-and-leak operation.”
It went on to indefinitely ban Trump while he was still in office—a move that the platform rescinded only months before his historic reelection and has now paid millions to avoid further litigation over.
At the same time, Facebook worked hand-in-glove with the federal government to silence skeptics who questioned the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
Zuckerberg told a House subcommittee in 2021 that Facebook “[removed] over 12 million pieces of false content” at the height of COVID-19. He boasted that it did “more to address misinformation than any other company” and added that he was “proud of the teams and systems … [it] built.”
Zuckerberg privately admitted later that year that the company “compromise[ed]” its standards “due to pressure.” Yet, Facebook continued to suppress the Chinese “lab leak theory” and “‘vaccine [discouraging] humor posts’ until at least January 2022.”
Similarly, during Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the company censored thousands of posts and accounts flagged as “Russian disinformation” by the FBI and a disgraced Ukrainian intelligence agency. Those included authentic accounts of users in the U.S. as well as “@usaporusski … the official, verified, Russian-language [Instagram] account of the U.S. State Department.”
Just five months later in August 2022, as Republicans were poised to retake the House, Zuckerberg made a strategic admission. He revealed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 based on guidance from the FBI.
Defending the decision, he said that Meta was merely complying with tips from the FBI.
In truth, however, Meta repeatedly censored speech against its own better judgment—going so far as to change its content policies—to appease the Biden administration.
An investigation by the House Judiciary Committee found that Facebook officials chose to censor the laptop story without credible evidence of a leak with the knowledge that their actions could influence the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg and Meta leadership concealed the overtly political motives of their censorship for years.
Only after the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Zuckerberg in contempt did the company fully cooperate with the investigation and produce all evidence of Meta’s collusion with various government entities like the White House and the FBI.
“…all power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton
We can forgive however, I don’t think we should ever forget. 25 million dollars is a lot but I doubt it’s enough for Mark Zuckerberg to never forget the harms he did to American Citizens for Our Freedom of Speech. I most certainly believe, if the Democrats won this time, he would be cozying up to them. I’m not sure what our Country should do, but I hate to say this, double the fine!