Suddenly free speech is cool again

This is not the Tipping Point they were expecting.

Now that the election is safely over, Mark Zuckerberg, the coward, admits that censorship went too far and free speech is important. He's decided that Facebook and Instagram will drop the third party "fact checkers" that crushed content and banned people because the "fact checkers" made too many mistakes. (Of course, he doesn't admit that these were not mistakes at all, but entirely the plan.)

As David Evans (the other half) says "Reminds me of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. It was the end of another leftist regime based on censorship and cancelling.  The good news just kept on coming."

It's a very limited mea culpa — it was  just good intentions and a bit of scope creep you know…

It's not like he was interfering in elections, tilting the balance to buy political protection,  increase his profits, or score points at dinner parties with billionaire friends.

From the Press Release:

More Speech and Fewer Mistakes

In recent years we've developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.

And it was only "harmless content" that was lost  and a bit of frustration was caused —  it's not like people died, wallowed in jail, or got attacked by illegal immigrants due to their loss of free speech:

Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in "Facebook jail," and we are often too slow to respond when they do.

The Fact Checkers turned out to have their own biases:

If his plan was to give more expert opinions so "the people could judge" it does seem odd that they hired 20 year old nobodies with no qualifications to censor Harvard Professors in medicine.

The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.

 We're not buying this miracle, Zuck, of how the people were supposed to be able to judge what they couldn't see and never read…

It was just terribly bad luck the fact checkers all happened to support the same side of politics that Zuckerberg donated $400 million dollars to in 2020: