MRC Founder and President Brent Bozell responded to a wild reversal on free speech by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but had a serious warning for users.
Bozell spoke to Newsmax host Carl Higbie about the historical significance and potential road bumps of Zuckerberg’s recent pledge to break with fact-checkers and scale back censorship. During the Jan. 7 edition of Carl Higbie Frontline, Brent pointed out just how far Zuckerberg had gone, admitting wrongdoing and providing specific changes instead of a vague statement about free speech. Bozell didn’t spare the Big Tech CEO, however, saying, “He groveled in this statement. He absolutely groveled. He made admissions of mistakes. He promised, he genuflected.”
Bozell went on to point out the significance of Zuckerberg’s decision to move his content moderation team out of California to Texas. “He said he's moving to Texas. He's moving his operation to Texas, a big part of it. That's a signal,” Bozell said. “That's a signal that Palo Alto is not where he wants to be, where he knows that if he really is going to embrace freedom of speech, he's got to get the hell out of Palo Alto. And he's got to go to Texas, where the skies are blue and the air is clear.”
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg made a shocking announcement, promising to “get rid of fact checkers” on Meta’s platforms, to scale back censorship on “topics like immigration and gender” and to move multiple groups of employees out of California, among other changes. This is a stunning change for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which wracked up a combined 1,725 cases of censorship in MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack database. The Media Research Center and its allies in the Free Speech Alliance have been pushing for Meta and other platforms to dismantle their censorship regimes for years, culminating in this huge win.
However, during the Newsmax segment, Bozell reminded viewers to be cautious. After Higbie warned that Zuckerberg’s apparent turn away from censorship might be temporary, Bozell made the point that Meta employees might not buy into these changes even in the present. “It's one thing for Mark Zuckerberg to say it. It's quite another for the tens of thousands of people at Facebook to obey it,” Bozell said, before drawing a comparison to X-owner Elon Musk’s initial struggles to control radical anti-free speech staffers after he purchased Twitter.
Bozell suggested that Meta employees would behave in similar ways and would “try to undermine Zuckerberg at Facebook.” He went on to tell Newsmax viewers, “At the end of the day, it's trust but verify. This is just the first step.” Bozell added, “I hope that free speech is the rule, not the exception.”
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
