The announcement of curbing censorship on Facebook and Instagram shows Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to get politically closer to Donald Trump and battle with woke liberal culture in a similar way to what Elon Musk did at X, formerly Twitter. However, the European Union’s reaction shows that the bloc is desperately attempting to preserve the woke agenda that has prevailed in previous years.
The founder of Meta admitted that censorship “went too far” on Facebook and Instagram, which are banned in Russia, and announced a sharp weakening of content moderation on the social media platforms. Similar to Musk, Zuckerberg will leave fact-checking to the users themselves instead of some external organizations, usually left-leaning, which often declare even what is an indisputable fact to be a lie.
Given that X had proven to be an effective means of verifying information, Zuckerberg saw that he could use that model and at the same time terminate cooperation with these so-called fact-checking organizations to whom Meta had contracted.
Facebook and Instagram were heavily criticized after Trump’s first term for spreading so-called fake news, and then Meta created a program for so-called fact-checking. Various organizations, including journalists, were involved in that program, and their task was to check posts on Facebook and Instagram that reached a larger number of people.
However, this was not a good solution because these organizations also declared fake news as facts. In this day and age, that is almost tantamount to killing the media because if media publications do not reach a large number of people through social media networks because they are declared fake news, then they are not even able to sell their content and be profitable.
According to Zuckerberg, he had previously sought to respond to demands from authorities and traditional media outlets for more censorship on American social networks. He added that the most recent US election was a “cultural turning point” that speaks to the priorities of freedom of speech and expression.
The owner of Meta later accused officials from the Biden administration of demanding that Facebook remove content criticizing COVID-19 vaccines.
Brussels has reacted angrily to Zuckerberg’s turn against censorship. This follows Musk’s successful path toward reducing censorship on social media, which created a thriving platform. This is unlike Facebook, which has experienced a decline since 2020. European politicians have also been loudly opposing Elon Musk and X’s influence on public opinion in the EU in recent weeks, and if Zuckerberg were to follow suit, it would be more difficult for Brussels to control information and public opinion.
The European Union could launch an investigation, even fine Meta, if it stops checking the veracity of information and thereby violates the Digital Services Act, said Thomas Regnier, spokesman for the European Commission for digital affairs.
Despite Regnier’s threats, European Commission spokesperson Paula Pinho had the audacity to claim, “We absolutely refuse any claims of censorship on our side,” when responding to recent claims made by Zuckerberg in a video published by Meta on January 7.
In the same video, the Meta CEO proposed a series of changes to Facebook and Instagram to limit censorship, stating that “Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship.” He added that he would work with Trump to push back on governments going against American companies.
The threat against Meta shows that Brussels lost the battle for technological innovation ten years ago when the Americans took complete primacy. That is why today, the EU does not have a single serious technological innovation, especially in the field of the internet.
China has meanwhile closed its market, leaving the EU unprotected from American platforms on the one hand and failing to nurture its innovations in a timely manner on the other. This is stated in the EU Innovation Report from last year, which recommended that the bloc provide hundreds of billions of euros annually to be able to catch up. However, these types of bans and administrative moves will not lead to the EU improving its position compared to China and the US in the field of innovation and will only lead to further stagnation and probably to the collapse of the European market.
On the other hand, many American technology companies have used the EU to market themselves well there and, for example, in Ireland, to set up their headquarters for the whole of Europe and take advantage of favourable tax rates. Therefore, one might expect countries enriched with American companies to protest against Brussels to retain American investors.
With Zuckerberg seemingly joining forces with Musk to overcome censorship, it certainly demonstrates that a cultural shift is occurring in the West, which is much more conservative and against woke liberalism than what has prevailed in the previous several decades. Censorship tried to stem this cultural shift but accelerated it instead, creating a new reality that Zuckerberg has now acknowledged.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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