J.D. Tuccille

Big tech seems to be getting out of the censorship business, and it’s about time. After years of increasingly awkward attempts to placate demands from activist groups and the government to suppress allegedly hateful speech and an amorphous category of “disinformation,” Facebook owner Meta is joining X (formerly Twitter) in substituting user-generated community notes on contested posts for top-down muzzling. There’s no doubt that political shifts in the U.S. heavily influenced the rediscovery of respect for free speech. But whatever the reason, we should celebrate the change and work to make it permanent.

Succumbing to Pressure To Censor

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a January 7 video. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far,” he added.

The implication here is that Zuckerberg and company succumbed to pressure to suppress speech disfavored by the bien pensant class, but rather than satisfying critics, that just fed demand to memory-hole ever more discussion and ideas. The ranks of those demanding that Facebook act as a censor also expanded and became more ominous.

“Even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg noted. “By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.”

This isn’t the first time the Meta CEO has cited government pressure to act as an end-run around the First Amendment’s protections for speech. In an August 26, 2024, letter to the House Judiciary Committee, he revealed that “senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.” He also admitted to suppressing reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop at the FBI’s request.

Succumbing to Pressure for Free Speech

By the time of that letter, the backlash against social media censorship was well underway. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) led to the publication of the Twitter files, revealing government pressure on the platform to suppress dissenting ideas. The Facebook files revealed the same of Zuckerberg’s company. U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty wrote that government pressure on tech platforms “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” These revelations vindicated complaints by critics of pandemic policy, conservatives, libertarians, and other dissenters that their efforts to communicate were being deleted, shadow-banned, and otherwise censored.

As early as 2020, Pew Research pollsters found “roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults say it is very (37%) or somewhat (36%) likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable.”

Which is to say, tech companies’ efforts to escape pressure over allowing users to publish “misinformation” wildly backfired. They came under more pressure than ever from those who objected—often rightly—that they were just trying to share information that others didn’t like.

If pressure led to censorship, it has also led to its reversal. That’s especially clear as Republicans pushed to allow lawsuits over online muzzling and then-candidate (now President-elect) Donald Trump thuggishly threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison” for his company’s activities.

Zuckerberg even acknowledges bowing to shifting political winds, saying, “the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

Whatever Mark Zuckerberg’s actual beliefs about freedom of speech, having once given in to political pressure to censor, he’s now succumbing to political pressure to end censorship. As journalist and date-cruncher Nate Silver puts it, “perhaps it’s the right move for the wrong reasons.” It’s quite likely that the Meta CEO’s motivations are pragmatic rather than principled. But at least he’s making the right move.

Zuckerberg now says he’ll follow in the footsteps of Elon Musk, who was the first tech tycoon to push back against pressures for censorship, first in public statements and then in his acquisition of Twitter.

“First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S.,” he noted in his video statement. He also promised to get rid of restrictions on “topics like immigration and gender” that were previously subject to scrutiny for alleged wrongthink, focus the attention of automated filters on explicitly illegal content rather than general discourse, and stop deemphasizing political content. Facebook will also move its moderation teams out of the ideological hothouse of California to Texas—arguably just a different ideological hothouse, though one better aligned with a country that just voted as it did and generally favors free speech over Big Brother.

Meta Joins Other Companies, Steps Back from Political Alliances

In backing away from a default affiliation with one faction of American politics as well as the government, Zuckerberg joins not just Musk but also executives at other companies who are jettisoning brief flirtations with trendy causes.

“Walmart is ending some of its diversity programs, the latest big company to shift gears under pressure from a conservative activist,” The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Nassauer reported in November. The article attributed the shift to public pressure which “has successfully nudged other companies including retailer Tractor Supply and manufacturers Ford and Deere to back away from diversity efforts and other topics.”

That report came after the election put Republicans back on top, but the cultural winds had already shifted direction. Bloomberg reported in March that “Wall Street’s DEI retreat has officially begun.” A few months later, the financial news service noted a decline in interest in environmental, social, and governance investment guidelines associated, like DEI, with the political left.

As in Zuckerberg’s case, it’s not obvious that the business executives in question had a sincere commitment to the causes they now reject, or that their principles, should they have any, have changed. Instead, they seem to belatedly recognize that allying with one faction in a divided society inevitably alienates others. That’s dangerous when the fortunes of factions inevitably rise and fall, and when potential customers can be found across the political spectrum.

By taking their companies out of the political fray and acknowledging their customers’ right to disagree with one another and with the government, Mark Zuckerberg and other business leaders can leave us room to work out our differences in a free society without worrying so much whether the people to whom we give our money are friends or foes.

From the Fraser Institute

By Tegan Hill

In a recent CBC interview, Premier Danielle Smith said she would “love to be able to accelerate our tax cut,” referring to her campaign promise to create a new 8 per cent tax bracket for personal income below $60,000, before adding that her government might not be able to maintain a balanced budget and introduce the cut. Fortunately, there’s a way Smith could achieve both: eliminate corporate welfare.

First, some background on Alberta’s recent tax changes.

In 2015, the provincial NDP government replaced Alberta’s single personal income tax rate of 10 per cent with a five-bracket system including a bottom rate of 10 per cent and a top rate of 15 per cent. Due to this change (and tax changes at the federal level, which increased the top federal income tax rate from 29 per cent to 33 per cent), Albertans faced significantly higher personal income tax rates.

Smith’s proposed tax cut would reduce Alberta’s bottom rate from 10 per cent to 8 per cent and is expected to save Albertans earning $60,000 or more $760 annually. While this change would fail to restore Alberta’s previous tax advantage, it would be a step in the right direction.

But due to fear of incurring a budget deficit, Smith has delayed fully implementing the $1.4 billion tax cut until 2027, contingent on the government being able to maintain a balanced budget.

Which takes us back to corporate welfare.

In 2019, after adjusting for inflation, the Alberta government spent $2.4 billion on subsidies to select businesses and industries. (In 2021, the latest year of available data, it spent $3.3 billion, however the pandemic may have contributed to this number.) And that’s not counting other forms of government handouts such as loan guarantees, direct investment and regulatory privileges for particular firms or industries. Put simply, eliminating corporate welfare would be more than enough to offset Smith’s proposed tax cut, which she promised Albertans in 2023.

Moreover, a significant body of research shows that corporate welfare fails to generate widespread economic benefits. Think of it this way; if businesses that receive subsidies were viable without subsidies, they wouldn’t need government handouts. Moreover, the government must impose higher tax rates on everyone else to pay for these subsidies. Higher taxes discourage productive activity, including business investment, which fuels economic growth. And the higher the rates, the more economic activity they discourage. Put simply, subsidies depress economic activity in some parts of an economy to encourage it in others.

For the same reason, corporate welfare also typically fails to generate new jobs on net. Indeed, while subsidies may create jobs in one specific industry, they pull those jobs away from other sectors that are likely more productive because they don’t need the subsidy.

The Smith government is hesitant to introduce Alberta’s tax cut if it can’t maintain a balanced budget, but if the government eliminates corporate welfare, it can avoid red ink while also fulfilling a promise it made to Alberta workers.

Tegan Hill

Director, Alberta Policy, Fraser Institute