Billionaires dangle free speech like a bauble. We gawp like open-mouthed babes

Zuckerberg, Trump, Musk. None care about free speech, least of all yours or mine. They care about power and remaining billionaires – or, better still, becoming trillionaires

A few observations on Mark Zuckerberg’s astonishing volte face today, declaring that he will end the crushing climate of censorship on his Meta platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, in time for Donald Trump's arrival in the White House.

It should not have taken a video admission from Zuckerberg for us to appreciate the degree to which we have been living for many years under a regime of political censorship on social media, with Meta leading the pack.

Just to take my own case as an illustration. My likes and shares on Facebook have been declining relentlessly over the past seven or eight years. But they took an especially sharp downturn after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The algorithm-gods at Meta decided it was critically important that the vast majority of my 44K followers should not be exposed to an anti-genocide perspective.

It is difficult to prove you are being throttled by a social media corporation. If you raise the issue of falling likes and shares, you are typically greeted with snark or rationalisations. It’s because you're less interesting / relevant / insightful than you were a while back. Or it’s because people are losing interest in social media in general, or in your kind of political content in particular.

None of that was ever convincing. Almost the minute Trump won the election, my fortunes on Facebook were transformed. Since early November my views, likes and shares are back where they were eight years ago, before Meta began slowly throttling my account. I am seeing posts there get more than 1K likes – something I had assumed would never be possible again.

The algorithms are still rigged against me, but much less so than they have been for many years.

In his grovelling video message to Trump – I mean, to Meta users – Zuckerberg effectively settles the question of whether his globe-spanning corporation has been aggressively corralling its 3 billion users away from political content. He admits it has.

What he has not admitted, and won’t, is that Meta has not even been trying to enforce that censorship evenhandedly or neutrally. We know, for example, that Meta’s algorithms were carefully engineered for many long months during Israel’s genocide in Gaza to keep Palestinian news sources out of public view, while the same algorithms left Israeli news sources unharmed.

For years, Zuckerberg’s goal – his business plan – has been to keep the main power-block of the western establishment happy: that is, the Biden administration, the three-letter agencies, the war industries, the “legacy media”, and the billionaire class to which he belongs.

None of them wanted voters thinking too deeply about politics – all the more so populist kinds of politics, whether of the left or right, that risked disturbing their smooth ride on the neoliberal gravy train and the forever wars from which they profit so handsomely.

Zuckerberg must now recalibrate his algorithms to keep the Trump team happy, and not stray too far from the “free speech” mantra of fellow billionaire and social media mogul Elon Musk. Zuckerberg must ensure his own platforms don’t end up getting treated like a US equivalent of TikTok, under risk of a ban for supposedly posing a “national security” threat.

No one seems to notice that, were Trump really some kind of free-speech warrior, Zuckerberg would not be so desperate to placate him, nor would the incoming president have been threatening for years to crack down on platforms just because they are not wholly owned by US billionaires.

Trump’s recent change of heart on TikTok, he has all but admitted, is because the newly domesticated platform is swinging younger voters his way.

Is Zuckerbeg serious about allowing more free speech? Probably, as my own post-election experience indicates. He must keep on the right side of the Trump administration at all costs, by easing up on the censorship of political content, just as earlier he kept on the right side of the Biden administration by tightening up on the censorship of political content.

Does that mean he is now a free speech champion? Don’t bet on it. He is in favour of free speech only in so far it is good for his business interests, just as Trump and Musk are. He will allow it only in so far as, and for as long as, Trump wants it. If free speech – or certain kinds of it – start to become a problem for Trump, as they surely will, the Trump administration will lean on him just as repressively as the outgoing Biden administration did.

The reality is no one in the establishment cares about free speech, least of all yours or mine. They care about power. They care about staying billionaires and, ideally, becoming trillionaires. What Zuckerberg has made clear is that free speech is not a principle. It is a toy, a plaything to be dangled in front of us, the people, who respond like grateful, credulous, open-mouthed babes.

We will be allowed free speech only in so far as it assists the powerful to stay powerful.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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