Zuckerberg triggers Democrats by saying ‘freedom of expression’

Democrats and liberals in government and the media are upset at Facebook because Facebook makes it too easy for people to get conservative opinions and reporting. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg must have known, then, that he was going to upset them by saying the words “freedom of expression.”

“Freedom of expression” is a bad thing in the more censorious regions of the Left these days.

The big blockbuster article recently arguing that Facebook was hurting millions of people rested on a “whistleblower” whose beef with Facebook was, at heart, “Facebook is getting trapped by our ideology of free expression.”

Last year, Zuckerberg’s invocation of “freedom of expression,” was blasted as “far-right politics.”

The substance of it is basically this: Facebook doesn’t shut down as many opinions or viewpoints as the Left wishes it did. Therefore, Facebook is harmful in its view.

“Offensive speech is harmful” or “bad opinions are violence” was once the official position of the Left only on campus, but an armada of censorious, woke millennial tech writers has helped make it into the viewpoint of the establishment Left and the Democratic Party.

New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose tweets regularly to complain that people on Facebook seeking and getting content are seeking and getting too much of the type of content he doesn’t like.

The New York Times would never run this stuff, and it’s pretty upsetting frankly, that people can get Ben Shapiro’s opinions so easily.

It’s not a simple matter, of course. I think Facebook ought to stop — if it can — al Qaeda, antifa, and the KKK from using the site to plan attacks. Incitement to violence is speech not necessarily protected by the First Amendment, and nobody would blame Facebook for quashing incitement on its site.

But Democrats have a much broader ask. They begin from the conviction that Hillary Clinton lost only because Russia used Facebook to send out memes of Donald Trump arm-wrestling Satan or something. They proceed to demand that bad stuff — the type of stuff that brings about such election outcomes — be quashed.

From the efforts Facebook and Twitter have made to quash “misinformation” or “disinformation,” we conservatives know what to expect next:

You will have to embrace the claims of radical gender ideology or be guilty of “misgendering;” pro-life statements about the humanity of the unborn will be called “misinformation” and taken down. And the sometimes laughable “fact checks” by left-wing media organizations that conveniently find for what Democrats want will be held up as dogma that one may not question.

Zuckerberg hopes he can navigate between the rocks of becoming another organ of the censorious Left and being canceled by it. I met with him last year (he fed me dinner, but I covered my own travel and lodging) and told him I didn’t think he could pull it off. We can’t have a uniform national understanding of what’s true and what’s false if we can’t agree that men cannot get pregnant.

I think Facebook is trying to do something — be a stage for everything — at a scale that is impossible. One thing that makes it impossible is that Democrats and liberals are used to being gatekeepers, and they’re upset that someone is keeping the gates wider open than they would.