Stefan Padfield: Mark Zuckerberg Acted Like a Good Capitalist By Responding to Calls for Free Speech

The times, they are a-changing, as our nation prepares to welcome Donald Trump back to the Oval Office. And this week we learned that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is apparently making big changes to Facebook in response to the election results.

On “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Free Enterprise Project (FEP) Executive Director Stefan Padfield explained the new Facebook policy:

It seems to mean that while they have previously relied on third parties and algorithms to essentially take down posts and comments, that they’re basically shifting to the system that we see on X (formerly Twitter), where the post will stay up absent something really glaring and egregious — could be child sex trafficking, something like that, that might take it down. But anything other than that — I think Zuckerberg was quoted as saying, if “you can say it on the floor of Congress,” then you can say it on our sites now — would just get community notes that would clarify and provide various perspectives. So this certainly seems like a step in the right direction.

We have certainly complained, those of us on the right, for a long time about how these “fact checkers,” “unbiased fact checkers,” were really just partisan, left-leaning censorship shops. And so it does seem to be a step in the right direction. But as always, we do have reason to be cautious in our enthusiasm for these changes as well….

FEP has hounded Big Tech CEOs like Zuckerberg for years over censorship and other leftist policies. But Stefan gives credit where credit is apparently due in this case:

I actually give Mark Zuckerberg credit for being somewhat transparent about the fact that he is simply responding to… primarily the election results. He saw what happened, and he took that in, and this is something where I think we can give him credit for acting like a good capitalist and taking the feedback, seeing the direction of the country, what his customers want — which is free speech certainly — and then providing it.

And again, this doesn’t mean that his own political views have necessarily changed dramatically, or that the makeup of the internal employees at Facebook, that their overall political leanings have changed…. But still there is something to feel good about, that he is actually being responsive to that, rather than doubling down and trying to create — I think one of the alternative forms is Bluesky, where they sort of try to create the new old leftist censorship utopia and I think that’s not faring very well. So he could have done that. But instead he’s trying to provide some free speech and give the users what they want, and we should reward that….

Stefan says that it really was only a matter of time until the Big Tech censorship model failed:

With the leftist radicalism — including their war on free speech and their enthusiasm for censorship — it eventually falls apart. It eventually eats its own tail, so to speak. Now the only question is: how long does it last, how much damage does it do along the way? But really part of what we’re seeing here is the inevitable, on some level, culmination of the radicalism with the censorship with the war on free speech. So that’s reason for optimism.

And as you say, we need to now keep building upon that. And we need to use the speech that we’re given on those platforms to really engage positively, to drive home the need for free speech.

But to some extent I think we can take comfort in — this is a saying I hear a lot — the common sense of the common man. These censorship efforts have failed ultimately because of the common sense of the common man and the integral belief in free speech. It has made its way through ultimately, after some tumultuous times, and as you say, now we get a chance to prove that it works, and continue to defend it….

It’s hard to ignore when a force like Meta, when a person like Zuckerberg, sort of tips his hat to the cultural shift and makes this dramatic change, so I would expect to see more [of these corporate changes] rather than less. It’s similar to what we’re seeing with a lot of corporations walking back DEI right now. We’re seeing more of it rather than less once the truth breaks out as to how problematic the left’s agenda is.