Matt Taibbi:

What kind of person is opposed in principle to less censorship? Readers of the New York Times, apparently! One of this site’s readers chuckled about the predictably mortified Times article(“Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False”) being filled with commenters “rending their garments over a prospect of an Internet full of propagandized idiots.” I looked and found a perfect cross-section of upper-class genitorture enthusiasts begging for harder, firmer content domination. The Washington Post headline was nearly as Onion-ish as the Times (“Meta ends fact-checking, drawing praise from Trump,” putting “free expression” in scare quotes in the sub-head), and its nearly 5000 comments were equally revealing. “User generated notes? The prisoners are now guarding the prison!” wrote one Post reader, who apparently sees life as a prison with insufficiently empowered jailers.

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But Facebook wasn’t just pressured to remove “covid-related misinformation,” but what Facebook itself internally described as “often-true content.” The firm was badgered to remove clearly protected satire (a joke ad comparing Covid vaccine to asbestos), unwelcome political opinion (“vaccine discouraging content”), content that didn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service (a Tucker Carlson video, for instance) and content related to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Even Joe Biden’s own account was temporarily deamplified on Facebook, thanks to algorithms that punished accounts mentioning vaccines too often.