Will Zuckerberg Bring Free Speech Back To Facebook?

December 9, 2025–Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg posted a video on Facebook and Instagram promising to reduce censorship and “return to our roots” of free expression on the platforms. He stated that Facebook would be ditching their Fact Checkers, instituting a system of Community Notes (like rival X now has), lift restrictions on some topics, focus more on policing illegal and high-severity violations, and changing the way political content is handled so that people who want to see more of it on their feeds can do so.

So, let me get this straight—the guy whose platforms have become infamous for censoring conservatives and those who spoke against The Narrative(™), gave $400 million in Zuckerbucks to help “secure” (read “steal”) the 2020 election, and helped squash “misinformation” like ivermectin and hydrochloride are effective for COVID; yes, that guy—is now saying he’s going to bring free speech back to his dying platforms?

You’ll pardon me if I don’t hold my breath.

On the surface, what Zuckerberg is promising to do sounds wonderful, and if I could believe it I’d be the first to laud him for it. Unfortunately, I’ve seen Facebook screw over conservatives, COVID skeptics and others who dared to go against The Narrative(™) too many times for a video and press release to impress me. The best I can give Facebook/Instagram/Threads at this point is a willingness to wait and see how they do. If they follow through on what Zuckerberg said Tuesday, then great! But, if they continue on as before…well, I’ve used Facebook and Instagram as little as possible for years now, so it’s no great loss to me.

I might be a little more willing to take Zuck’s words at face value if he’d made a serious mea culpa. Instead, what I heard was a mealy-mouthed “we had the best intentions” but “the fact checkers we hired were too politicized.” Not exactly an apology for what his platforms have done and I, like The Federalist, am not willing to give him an amnesty for all those years of anti-American, anti-1st Amendment censorship. His little 5 minute video didn’t begin to address the significant harm Facebook’s censorship policies inflicted on the nation and the world by restricting free speech on politics, COVID, transgenderism and multiple other topics, so I think I’m in good company with not being ready to give him a free pass for that.

The timing of this announcement is significant. The video premiered on Fox & Friends and was followed by an interview with Joel Kaplan—former Bush staffer, Republican operative and now Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer. It came the day after UFC head (and Friend of Trump) Dana White was appointed to the Meta board, and it’s been less than a month since Zuck made the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring (and try to stay out of jail).

It’s obvious that Zuckerberg is trying to reposition his company for the new Trump administration, because he knows there’s a new Sheriff coming to town. Since 2016, Facebook has actively worked with the Powers That Be to suppress unfavored viewpoints, and that’s about to become an unworkable strategy.

It’s also interesting that Zuckerberg is committing Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads) to use an X-style system of Community Notes to police its platform. Since X introduced Community Notes, it’s shown to be an effective method of crowdsourcing fact checking. Of course, it’s also been used by mobs of mostly left-wingers to target some accounts, and I can’t help but wonder if Zuck & Co. will do a better job than Elon has at keeping this under control.

Most interesting of all, Zuckerberg claims he’s going to use his platforms to push free speech globally at the same time that Elon Musk is doing just the opposite. One of the most significant long-term effects of the MAGA Civil War between the America Firsters and the Tech Bros (or as Joe Klein calls us, “Troglodytic-MAGA versus Quantum-MAGA”) is Elon going full censorship on influencers who disagreed with him on H1B visas. They’ve had their Blue Checks removed, which drops their reach and demonetizes them, and it’s created the perception that you have free speech on X only until you disagree with Elon. This happening just a couple of days after Elon finalized a $6 billion dollar AI financing package with BlackRock and Sequoia Capital, among others, didn’t go unnoticed.

Elon’s little meltdown where he told a poster who questioned him to “f**k yourself in the face” didn’t help. That particular reply has apparently been deleted, but screenshots are eternal.

Wednesday evening (Jan. 8th), I asked Grok (X’s AI) how many users had been deplatformed in the last thirty days. The answer: 5.3 million.

Read that again: 5.3 million people booted from X in the previous month. Does that sound like free speech to you?

This is eerily similar to what Facebook has been doing since 2017, throttling traffic to conservative websites by 93%. The concern has been, rightly, that X is moving in the same direction. If you can lose your followers and monetization on a whim, can you trust the platform? And with X Pay scheduled to launch later this year, who’ll trust it? Most of us know conservatives that have been shafted by PayPal or Patreon, to the point that they’re both very much “use at your own risk.” As things now stand, there’s no way I’ll be using X Pay. I remember how Obama used credit card barriers and debanking against the gun stores, and X’s behavior these last couple of weeks is far too similar to that for comfort.

I wonder if Elon knows just how badly he damaged his platform and his brand with his little tantrum? He may have an inkling—his new push to repress “negativity” smacks of a desperation move to polish both—but he’s going to find that MAGA isn’t as forgiving as he’d like. We’ve been burned too many times before, and Musk’s betrayal of free speech is too much like Zuckerberg’s before him.

Zuckerberg is in a bad position, and he knows it. His platforms, while still the largest in the world, are withering. Instagram was the #1 deleted app in 2023, and Facebook’s growth has stagnated. The FTC lawsuit to break up Meta is going forward. Conservatives are very much upset with him for how they’ve been treated, and rightly so. There are even those of us, myself included, that want the 2020 election manipulation and fraud investigated fully. That certainly won’t put Zuckerberg and his platforms in a good light.

“Facebook jail” is all too familiar to conservatives. Wonder how Zuckerberg would like being put in REAL jail?

Zuckerberg’s new stance is too little, too late for me. He’ll have to do more to actually show us he means what he says, and put in the work to fix the censorship, shadowbanning and suppression across all his platforms. If he can do that quickly, he has an opportunity to regain our confidence, and also to stick it to Elon Musk and X.

Until that happens, Andrew Torba’s Gab platform is looking better and better every day.

I’ll put the pertinent links in when I post this article on my free Substack, DocContrarian.Substack.com.

Zuckerberg’s Video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEhf2uTJUs0/?igsh=a2d1dWU3MXZqZXRm

Dr. Bill Chitwood is a retired Child, Adolescent and Family Psychiatrist who does political consulting and media relations. He is the author of Beyond Maga, available on Amazon under his pen name, Doc Contrarian. He can be found on Substack and social media as @DocContrarian.

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