Media Research Center President Brent Bozell told Newsmax on Tuesday that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "groveled" and "genuflected" in announcing a series of content monitoring changes to his social media platforms earlier in the day.
With President-elect Donald Trump taking office in less than two weeks, Bozell said the timing of the changes and Zuckerberg's behavior were intentional.
"I think what Trump is signaling to all of Big Tech is that this is going to be a different administration than the first time around. This time, he's not going to play nice with these people," Bozell said on "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE."
In part, Zuckerberg announced the end of a third-party fact-checking program and the lifting of restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse.
Bozell, who said MRC "documented censorship 1,725 times coming from Meta alone," said Zuckerberg is rightly concerned about losing his Section 230 protection of being a platform rather than a publisher.
"Once you prove that censorship, you can say they're publishers. If you take away that Section 230 protection, then it's 'Katy, bar the door' with anyone who's been slandered by Facebook and where you're not allowed to defend yourself when you're slandered by others," Bozell said. "So I think the message [from] Donald Trump was, 'Look what I did to ABC News; look what I'm going to do to you and look what everyone else is going to do to you.'"
Hence, Zuckerberg "groveled" in his announcement, Bozell said.
"You listen to Mark Zuckerberg's words today. He could have just given pablum; we believe in free speech, yada yada. He groveled in this statement. He absolutely groveled. He made admissions of mistakes. He promised, he genuflected. ... He's moving his operation to Texas," Bozell said. "That's a signal that Palo Alto is not where he wants to be, where he knows that if he really is going to embrace freedom of speech, he's got to get the hell out of Palo Alto."
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Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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