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Dear Friend,
Days before President Donald Trump took his oath of office last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to Facebook’s and Instagram’s content moderation policies. The social media platforms would scrap their third-party fact-checkers, he said, and instead institute a community notes system to flag questionable content. The recent elections, Zuckerberg admitted, felt like “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
Zuckerberg, of course, meant “free speech.” Several years ago, Facebook, Twitter, and other web outlets ramped up censorship of online news they deemed “misinformation.” Two famous examples were the suppression of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and criticism of the COVID-19 vaccine. A more recent case occurred in October, when editors at Wikipedia censored an election polling average from RealClearPolitics after the political news site produced a map suggesting Trump might once again win the White House.
As Emma Freire reports in the latest issue of WORLD, such censorship in recent years has been encouraged or coordinated by government officials, part of a censorship apparatus developed during the Cold War and using technology built during the war on terror. That censorship machine was turned toward populism and Trump supporters in 2016. Will Trump’s reelection herald a broad turn back toward free speech, as Zuckerberg suggested?
Also in this issue, Kim Henderson reports on a highly unusual effort by a group of parents to suppress a manifesto written by the attacker in the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tenn. If they prevail in a court case over the late shooter’s writings, it may set a legal precedent preventing the release of evidence connected to future mass killings.
There’s more news, reviews, and analysis in the latest issue of WORLD Magazine. Please read on for a sampling of our March edition.
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