Business
Facebook’s New Free Speech Policy Shows Business Getting Back to Business
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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.
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2025 Federal Election
MEI-Ipsos poll: 56 per cent of Canadians support increasing access to non-governmental healthcare providers
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Most believe private providers can deliver services faster than government-run hospitals
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77 per cent of Canadians say their provincial healthcare system is too bureaucratic
Canadians are increasingly in favour of breaking the government monopoly over health care by opening the door to independent providers and cross-border treatments, an MEI-Ipsos poll has revealed.
“Canadians from coast to coast are signalling they want to see more involvement from independent health providers in our health system,” explains Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI. “They understand that universal access doesn’t mean government-run, and that consistent failures to deliver timely care in government hospitals are a feature of the current system.”
Support for independent health care is on the rise, with 56 per cent of respondents in favour of allowing patients to access services provided by independent health entrepreneurs. Only 25 per cent oppose this.
In Quebec, support is especially strong, with 68 per cent endorsing this change.
Favourable views of accessing care through a mixed system are widespread, with three quarters of respondents stating that private entrepreneurs can deliver healthcare services faster than hospitals managed by the government. This is up four percentage points from last year.
Countries like Sweden and France combine universal coverage with independent providers and deliver faster, more accessible care. When informed about how these health systems run, nearly two in three Canadians favour adopting such models.
The poll also finds that 73 per cent of Canadians support allowing patients to receive treatment abroad with provincial coverage, which could help reduce long wait times at home.
Common in the European Union, this “cross-border directive” enabled 450,000 patients to access elective surgeries in 2022, with costs reimbursed as if they had been treated in their home country.
There’s a growing consensus that provincial healthcare systems are overly bureaucratic, with the strongest agreement in Alberta, B.C., and Quebec. The proportion of Canadians holding this view has risen by 16 percentage points since 2020.
Nor do Canadians see more spending as being a solution: over half say the current pace of healthcare spending in their province is unsustainable.
“Governments shouldn’t keep doubling down on what isn’t working. Instead, they should look at what works abroad,” says Ms. Faubert. “Canadians have made it clear they want to shift gears; now it’s up to policymakers to show they’re listening.”
A sample of 1,164 Canadians aged 18 and older was polled between March 24th and March 28th, 2025. The margin of error is ±3.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The results of the MEI-Ipsos poll are available here.
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The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.
From the Fraser Institute
In 2019 Toronto District School Board (TDSB) trustees passed a “climate emergency” resolution and promised to develop a climate action plan. Not only does the TDSB now have an entire department in their central office focused on this goal, but it also publishes an annual climate action report.
Imagine you were to ask a random group of Canadian parents to describe the primary mission of schools. Most parents would say something along the lines of ensuring that all students learn basic academic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics.
Fewer parents are likely to say that schools should focus on reducing their environmental footprints, push students to engage in environmental activism, or lobby for Canada to meet the 2016 Paris Agreement’s emission-reduction targets.
And yet, plenty of school boards across Canada are doing exactly that. For example, the Seven Oaks School Division in Winnipeg is currently conducting a comprehensive audit of its environmental footprint and intends to develop a climate action plan to reduce its footprint. Not only does Seven Oaks have a senior administrator assigned to this responsibility, but each of its 28 schools has a designated climate action leader.
Other school boards have gone even further. In 2019 Toronto District School Board (TDSB) trustees passed a “climate emergency” resolution and promised to develop a climate action plan. Not only does the TDSB now have an entire department in their central office focused on this goal, but it also publishes an annual climate action report. The most recent report is 58 pages long and covers everything from promoting electric school buses to encouraging schools to gain EcoSchools certification.
Not to be outdone, the Vancouver School District (VSD) recently published its Environmental Sustainability Plan, which highlights the many green initiatives in its schools. This plan states that the VSD should be the “greenest, most sustainable school district in North America.”
Some trustees want to go even further. Earlier this year, the British Columbia School Trustees Association released its Climate Action Working Group report that calls on all B.C. school districts to “prioritize climate change mitigation and adopt sustainable, impactful strategies.” It also says that taking climate action must be a “core part” of school board governance in every one of these districts.
Apparently, many trustees and school board administrators think that engaging in climate action is more important than providing students with a solid academic education. This is an unfortunate example of misplaced priorities.
There’s an old saying that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Organizations have finite resources and can only do a limited number of things. When schools focus on carbon footprint audits, climate action plans and EcoSchools certification, they invariably spend less time on the nuts and bolts of academic instruction.
This might be less of a concern if the academic basics were already understood by students. But they aren’t. According to the most recent data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the math skills of Ontario students declined by the equivalent of nearly two grade levels over the last 20 years while reading skills went down by about half a grade level. The downward trajectory was even sharper in B.C., with a more than two grade level decline in math skills and a full grade level decline in reading skills.
If any school board wants to declare an emergency, it should declare an academic emergency and then take concrete steps to rectify it. The core mandate of school boards must be the education of their students.
For starters, school boards should promote instructional methods that improve student academic achievement. This includes using phonics to teach reading, requiring all students to memorize basic math facts such as the times table, and encouraging teachers to immerse students in a knowledge-rich learning environment.
School boards should also crack down on student violence and enforce strict behaviour codes. Instead of kicking police officers out of schools for ideological reasons, school boards should establish productive partnerships with the police. No significant learning will take place in a school where students and teachers are unsafe.
Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with school boards ensuring that their buildings are energy efficient or teachers encouraging students to take care of the environment. The problem arises when trustees, administrators and teachers lose sight of their primary mission. In the end, schools should focus on academics, not environmental activism.
Michael Zwaagstra
Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
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