Leading journalist calls Zuckerberg's free speech announcement "an invitation to genocide," EU parliamentarians petition for actions to mitigate the "systemic risk" of Elon Musk, and other lunacies

Germany in particular and the EU in general are losing their minds about American social media and it is not funny anymore.

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared war on the European Union and endorsed genocide posted this video to Instagram announcing changes to his content moderation policy:

Important and powerful people in Europe are losing their minds about this video, so before I go any further, I want to be very clear about its contents.

The video features Zuckerberg ensconced in a wood-panelled room vaguely resembling a sauna, saying various things about speech and freedom into the camera. Zuckerberg announces that “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” and more than once he refers to the censorious policies of “governments and legacy media.” He says that “The recent elections … feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech,” and he promises to “focus on … restoring free expression on our platforms.”

For this he has a six-point plan:

1) Facebook and Instagram are going to phase-out their fact-checkers, beginning in the United States. They will replace these noble arbiters of truth “with community notes similar to X.” This is necessary because “the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.” (In perhaps the most amusing and satisfying development of all time, the fact-checkers are presently fact-checking Zuckerberg’s statements about fact-checking and declaring them false.)

2) Facebook and Instagram will “simplify … content policies and get rid of a bunch of restritions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Inclusivity “has gone too far,” Zuckerberg says.

3) Content filters on Facebook and Instagram will be recalibrated to target “illegal and high-severity violations”; detecting “lower-severity violations” will depend on user reports. “The problem,” Zuckerberg says, “is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t.”

4) Zuckerberg will be “bringing back civic content,” by which he means posts about political matters. He asks us to believe that “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed,” but argues that “we’re in a new era,” one in which political content for some mysterious reason is no longer stressful:: “So we’re gonna start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads.”

5) Zuckerberg is going to order his “trust and safety and content moderation teams” to move from California to Texas.

6) Last of all, Zuckerberg and his fellow Zuckerbergians at Facegram are “gonna work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countires 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 US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US government has pushed for censorships. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.

I hope we can agree on a few points: Zuckerberg is a businessman who sells the attention of Facebook’s three billion monthly users to advertisers. While Zuckerberg is not a free speech crusader, heavy-handed political censorship was also never really in his interests. Social media censorship campaigns emerged after the great populist backlashes of 2016 in response to pressure from government bureaucrats. Since Trump’s election, the United States finds itself in the middle of a preference cascade against the progressive liberal excesses of the past decade, and Zuckerberg is simply responding to pervasive cultural forces. His statement is not revolutionary and it does not herald a Brave New Era of Freedom on the Internet. The most immediate changes are also exclusive to America; Zuckerberg hopes vaguely that the Trump administration will back his companies in their efforts to reduce content moderation outside the United States, but here he describes no concrete plans.

I want to be clear about all of this, because in Germany they have occasioned yet another freakout about the internet and social media and the unhealthy influence of American tech magnates, after the three or four that Elon Musk has already set off. Normally I’d find this amusing, as it is my wont to mock the schoolmarm hysteria of the political elite and their journalist collaborators. Increasingly, though, I’m having trouble scraping together the enthusiasm for this kind of comedy. It’s starting to really worry me. These people are becoming so deranged – their rhetoric so unhinged – it’s not inconceivable they end up blocking Twitter or setting up some clunky version of the Great Firewall to protect Europeans from the internet. I make my living on the internet. I don’t want that to happen.