The Era of Censored Social Media Is Over — for America

Brussels, meanwhile, retains the progressive faith in managing democratic outcomes by regulating what can and can’t be said.

Mark Zuckerberg’s dismissal of Facebook’s fact-checkers and his replacement of them with a “community notes” approach pioneered by Elon Musk at X (formerly Twitter) signals the end of an aberrant era in American politics that began shortly after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016. The era of trying to manage American political outcomes by having social media superintend, rather than facilitate, political debate is over.

Social media companies were wrongly held up as the instigators and vanguard of progressive political change when used by activists in the Middle East a decade and a half ago, and when the Obama reelection campaign made extensive — and invasive — use of Facebook features in 2012. And in turn, they were wrongly held up as scapegoats for the (orders of magnitude) less intrusive use by Cambridge Analytica, and the voters who empowered Brexit and Donald Trump in that year of populist revolt. Because social media in some ways can shape or alter user behavior, just as the known presence of a camera can do the same, it was wrongly accused of determining (unwelcome) democratic outcomes.