The letter, made public on Monday, comes days after Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was detained in France over allegations that Durov did not moderate content on his platform extensively enough to satisfy European Union censorship laws thoroughly enough.
The letter noted that Meta was pressured into suppressing posts about COVID-19, even satirical ones, and was also primed in advance to censor stories about the infamous laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Zuckerberg’s letter has largely been celebrated by free speech advocates as both a confirmation of their suspicions and as one of America’s most influential billionaires joining the fight against the crackdown on online speech. However, a close reading of Zuckerberg’s letter and recent comments reveals that his intention likely is not to end or reduce censorship but rather to increase censorship, just in a non-partisan way.
“I think Zuckerberg is trying to rebrand. I think that’s really what this is. I think he’s wanting to get out of politics entirely,” independent journalist and political talk show host Kim Iverson told Sputnik’s Political Misfits on Tuesday. “He’s losing people on the right that feel like Facebook and Meta in general is censoring everybody and then he’s losing people on the left that are pointing the finger at him and saying that it’s his fault for [Former US President Donald] Trump winning.”
In an interview with US media last month, before Durov was arrested, Zuckerberg said his platforms are making changes to become less political.
“The main thing I hear from people is they actually want to see less political content on our services because they come to our services to connect with people,” Zuckerberg explained in the interview, reportedly also saying that his platforms already are recommending less political content to their users.
“He flat out said they’re going to be demoting content that is political,” Iverson explained. “They’re really going to try to limit it because they want their platforms to be more about connection and social rather than political.”
As Political Misfits host Michelle Witte noted, Facebook recently banned news outlet The Cradle from its platform. The Cradle has published significant investigations into the Israeli war on Gaza and its banning is another sign that Zuckerberg’s letter does not portend a more open platform.
“I think that Mark Zuckerberg is clearly very much afraid of Congress. He’s afraid of the government and he’s still behaving that way,” Iverson asserted. “[He is] literally just saying I’m going to censor all of you, in particular anything that’s going to get me in trouble, which is everything and anything.”
*Meta, which owns Facebook, is banned in Russia for extremist activities