Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will guarantee freedom of speech: here's how he can prove it

Today we have announced an important change in the ideological censorship policies that Facebook has been applying for years.

Facebook suspends Counting Stars' page without having had any infringements
The Zuckerberg's trouble when asked about the censorship of conservatives on Facebook

In a video posted on his Facebook profile, Mark Zuckerberg announced today that he will protect freedom of expression and end the fact-checking program, which has been receiving widespread criticism for its ideological bias against conservatives.

In addition, Zuckerberg has announced that he will implement a Twitter-like community notes system on Meta's social networks (Facebook, Instagram and Threads), a tool that has proven to be much more reliable and effective in combating hoaxes.

This announcement, made just days before Donald Trump's inauguration as US president, demonstrates a change of trend in the wave of attacks on freedom of expression from large technology companies, most of which are ideologically aligned with the left, with the major exception of Twitter since the arrival of Elon Musk.

However, Zuckerberg's announcement leaves some questions. One of them concerns the content that his social networks have been arbitrarily removing. Will Mark Zuckerberg restore the content that Facebook abusively censored? Facebook and Instagram have been applying abusive and ideologically motivated censorship for years. This censorship has been particularly harsh on conservative users, even though they did not violate the community standards of that social network. Often, this censorship has been imposed without any kind of explanation by Meta's social networks.

Two months ago, I posted the example here of the suspension of the Counting Stars Facebook page, a censorship imposed a few days before the US presidential elections and without having committed any infractions for 14 years. Facebook did not indicate which point of its community standards the page supposedly violated, nor did it give me the slightest option to appeal that decision.

Given this, it is not enough for Zuckerberg to announce a change now: he has to restore what he has abusively censored. Facebook has the tools to make that possible and knows perfectly well what kind of abusive censorship it has been imposing and on whom. If Zuckerberg does not restore this content, then his announcement is nothing more than empty words, a mere marketing operation to try, possibly, to recover all the users that Facebook has been losing due to this censorship.

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Image: Facebook.