From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

In a surprise early morning post, Mark Zuckerberg took to Instagram to announce that Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – will be taking steps to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” while seemingly placing a large share of the blame for past extreme censorship measures on pressure from the Biden administration and legacy media.

“The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” noted Zuckerberg, who met with president-elect Donald Trump shortly after his decisive election victory.  

Zuckerberg said that while he started building social media “to give people a voice,” “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” 

“A lot of this is clearly political,” he noted.  

He explained that Meta’s complex systems for guarding against harmful content such as drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation have been prone to make mistakes: “It’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship.” 

Following X/Twitter’s lead, Meta platforms will replace “fact-checkers” with “community notes.”

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” said Zuckerberg, but Meta’s fact checkers have been “too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” 

Meta will also move its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and its U.S.-based content review will soon be based in Texas.  

“We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s gone too far.” 

‘It feels like a new era now’ 

“We’re bringing back civic content,” said Zuckerberg. “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.” 

“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” said the social media titan.  

“The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world,” but other countries continue to exert substantial force to limit free speech on the internet. 

Zuckerberg explained: 

• Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.    

• Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.  

• China has censored our apps from even working in the country.

“The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government,” he insisted. “And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.”  

“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” he continued. “But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.”  

‘Humility’ to now play a role in Meta’s management of its platforms 

In his 2019 speech at Georgetown University that portended social media’s crackdown on free speech, especially those expressing thoughts at odds with woke ideology, Zuckerberg claimed, “Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that’s dangerous.”  

The changes that were announced by Zuckerberg this morning are an attempt to return to the commitment to free expression he set out in his Georgetown speech, according to Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer.  

“That means being vigilant about the impact our policies and systems are having on people’s ability to make their voices heard, and having the humility to change our approach when we know we’re getting things wrong.” 

However, Facebook has long faced criticism for its harsh censorship regime, including for deplatforming conservative users and censoring speech critical of COVID mandates and the LGBT agenda, in addition to facilitating child sex trafficking. 

In 2020, Zuckerberg spent more than $400 million to influence the presidential race that year, which election integrity advocates have credited with likely handing the White House to Joe Biden. 

X/Twitter and Facebook headed in opposite directions? 

Just as Mark Zuckerberg announced a new era of free speech on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Elon Musk and his social media giant, X (formerly Twitter) seemed to be headed in the opposite direction, toward increased censorship and suppression.

Musk and X were slammed on X over the weekend after new restrictions and punitive measures were revealed for posts critical of X, those that are deemed to be too negative, and even those that “critique or challenge other users or public figures in a way that’s perceived as harsh or personal rather than constructive.” 

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in an interview on CSPAN, Sept. 30, 2000

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

Shortly before his death in 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman over dinner in San Francisco. The last question I asked him was: What are the three things we had to do to make America more prosperous?

His answer I have never forgotten: “First, allow universal school choice; second, expand free trade; third and most importantly, cut government spending.” That was long before Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden came along.

There are not too many problems in America that cannot be traced back to the growth of big and incompetent government.

It is notable that the two big bursts of inflation during modern times both occurred when government spending exploded. The first was the gigantic expansion of the LBJ “war on poverty” welfare state in the 1970s with prices nearly doubling, and then the post-COVID era spending blitz in the last year of Trump and then the Biden $6 trillion spending spree with the CPI sprinting from 1.5% to 9.1%.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.

The connection between government flab and the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is obvious. In both cases the Washington spending blitz was funded by Federal Reserve money printing. The helicopter money caused prices to surge. (I still find it laughable that 11 Nobel prize-winning economists wrote in the New York Times in 2021: Don’t worry, the Biden multi-trillion-dollar spending spree won’t cause inflation.)

The avalanche of federal spending hasn’t stopped even though COVID ended more than three years ago. We are three months into the 2025 fiscal year and on pace to spend an all-time high $7 trillion and borrow $2 trillion. If we stay on this course, the federal budget could reach $10 trillion over the next decade.

This road to financial perdition cannot stand. It risks blowing up the Trump presidency.

Upon entering office, Trump should on day one call for a package of up to $500 billion of rescissions — money that the last Congress appropriated but has not been spent yet. Cancelling the green energy subsidies alone could save nearly $100 billion. Why are we still spending money on COVID?

We could save tens of billions by ending corporate welfare programs — such as the wheel barrels full of tax dollars thrown at companies like Intel in the CHIPS Act. The Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency is already identifying low hanging fruit that needs to be cut from the tree.

Along with extending the Trump tax cut of 2017, this erasure of bloated federal spending is critical for economic revival and for reversing the income losses to the middle class under Biden.

This is especially urgent because the curse of inflation is NOT over. Since the Fed started cutting interest rates in October, commodity prices are up nearly 5% and the mortgage rates have again hit 7% — in part because the combination of cheap money and government expansion is a toxic economic brew — as history teaches us.

Nothing could suck the oxygen and excitement out of the new Trump presidency more than a resumption of inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. Trump’s record-high approval rating will sink overnight if the cost of everything starts rising again.

Cutting spending won’t be easy. The resistance won’t just come from Bernie Sanders Democrats. Trump will have to convince lawmakers in his own party — many of whom are already defending green-new-deal pork projects in their districts.

This is why Trump should make the case in his inaugural address that downsizing government is the moral equivalent of war. Borrow a line from Nancy Reagan: just say no — to runaway government spending. Say yes to what Friedman titled his famous book: “Capitalism and Freedom.”

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”