When Joe Rogan hosts an interview, the winds of culture shift.

This week, he sat down with Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to discuss the history of social media censorship and the future of free speech.

Democrats are crying that Zuckerberg has capitulated to the incoming Trump regime. They should be worried. For two and a half hours, the tech giant spilled the uncomfortable details of industrial-scale censorship led by the Biden Administration.

‘We’ve been on a long journey,’ Zuckerberg began, with an ‘escaped from captivity’ vibe. ‘You only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice. The whole point of social media is basically giving people the ability to share what they want.’

Building Facebook made Zuckerberg the world’s youngest billionaire. He is currently estimated to be worth $211.1 billion against Elon Musk’s $416.2 billion (the wealthiest person in the world).

Originally, Facebook focused on connecting college friends and family, playing into the human character flaw of ‘being nosy’ about an ex, a potential mate, or a lost relative.

‘We run ads to make it a free service everyone in the world can afford,’ he said, in 2018.

Little did Zuckerberg know that the price would be the capitulation of Facebook to marketing tyrants who didn’t want their ads to appear next content they found problematic.

The existence of problematic content and the threat of revenue loss created a niche for the fact-checkers. They essentially promised to sanitise the public forum to secure ad revenue, monetising Orwell’s nightmare.

That era has finished.

Facebook is switching from fact-checkers to an X-style community notes system.

According to AdNews:

Analysts warn of a danger to Meta’s advertising business which is second in the world to Google in gathering digital ad dollars. Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said the move could ‘spook’ many advertisers. ‘Brand safety remains a key factor in determining where advertisers spend their budgets. Social media is already a minefield for content that many brands deem unsafe and Meta’s change could exacerbate those problems.’

Advertisers tried to do the same thing to Elon Musk, threatening to pull their advertising unless Musk re-established various censorial measures.

Musk’s reply was his famous: ‘Go f- yourself.’

He added, ‘In some cases, there were advertisers who were insisting on censorship. At the end of the day … if we have to make a choice between censorship and losing money, or censorship and money, or free speech and losing money, we’re going to choose the second.’

These were not the words of a man too rich to care about advertising revenue, Elon Musk knew that free speech was his market advantage and that a short-term loss of some twitchy advertising companies would pale in comparison to the lucrative market of eyeballs he was creating. Those advertisers crawled back. No doubt Zuckerberg wagers there is no real risk. Musk called their bluff.

For many years, we have had our suspicions that social media curated the edges of the public conversation in the interests of corporations, advertisers, and politicians. The Utopian idea behind social media might be free speech, but the reality of its business model is the centralisation of customers and voters. The service may be free, but everything about a customer is monetised, including their opinion.

Social media is a two-way street between power and profit, outrage and revolution.

Think of this way. Brands want to sell to Facebook customers, but they are also terrified of a Bud Light boycott which could destroy their business overnight. Politicians desire the exposure, but resent the instant criticism of their policies. Censorship tilted the system in favour of corporations and politicians.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X), dissolved the glue of censorship across all platforms, including Facebook.

Joe Rogan asked Zuckerberg for his opinion on where the path of censorship began.

‘It was really in the last 10 years that people started pushing for ideological-based censorship and I think it was two main events that really triggered this.

‘In 2016 there was the election of President Trump [which] basically coincided with BREXIT in the EU and the fragmentation of the EU. And then, in 2020, there was Covid … for the first time we faced this massive – massive – institutional pressure to start censoring content on ideological grounds.’

Zuckerberg then admitted that in 2016 he gave too much deference to folks in the media who were saying ‘there is no way Trump could have gotten elected except for misinformation’.

Is misinformation and disinformation about truth, or politics?

The question matters because, like the Biden Administration, both Labor and the Liberals have tried to pass policies of this nature that interfere with social media. Are they misleading us as to their motives?

‘I was really worried, from the beginning, about becoming this decider of what is true in the world. That’s kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service.’

This is where Facebook began its third-party fact-checking system.

‘We were like, alright, we’re just going to have this system where third-party fact-checkers can check the worst of the worst stuff, right? So, things that are very clear hoaxes. It’s not like we’re parsing speech as something that is slightly true or slightly false. Like, Earth is flat. Things like that. That was the original intent.

‘We put in place the system and it just sort of veered from there. I think to some degree it is because of the people whose job it is to do fact-checking, a lot of their industry is focused on political fact-checking, so they just sort of veered in that direction … it was in what types of things they chose to go and fact-check in the first place.

‘It’s something out of, like, 1984 when in these books where it really is a slippery slope. It got to a point where it was just, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program and I guess it was probably about a few years before I really started coming to the conclusion that we were going to need to change something about that.’

Barely seven minutes into the interview, and those who have suffered under Facebook’s fact-checking Mafia are nodding along.

Then Zuckerberg came to the topic of Covid.

He first describes it as a legitimate public health crisis and notes that the ability to speak freely can be temporarily curtailed in an emergency, a view to which he was sympathetic.

Facebook chose to give ‘a bit of deference’ to government and the health authorities. Over time, this advice became difficult to follow.

‘It was during the Biden Administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program … while they were trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was arguing against it. They pushed us super hard to take down things that, honestly, were true.’

This is a shocking abuse of power from the Biden regime, one that was mimicked in Australia and around the world.

Zuckerberg adds that they were effectively told ‘anything that says vaccines might have side effects you need to take down’. It was an instruction he resisted.

‘These people from the Biden Administration would call up our team and would, like, scream at them and curse. It’s like, these documents… They are all out there. The emails are published. It’s all out there.’

Why did the Biden Administration engage in abusive conversations with Facebook? Who were they protecting by forcing Facebook to take down comments? Certainly not those attempting to report vaccine injuries.

One of the most interesting things Zuckerberg said about the political pressure is this:

‘The tough thing with politics is that … there’s what specific thing an agency might be looking into you for and then there is the underlying political motivation which is like, why do the people who are running this thing hate you? Those can often be two very different things.’

The White House set the dogs on Facebook when they originally resisted attempts to censor satire, humour, and the truth.

‘And then at some point I guess, ah, it flipped a bit. I mean, Biden when he gave some statement at some point, I don’t know if it was a press conference or some journalists, where he was basically like: These guys are killing people. And, I don’t know. Then all these different agencies and branches of government started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal.’

Joe Rogan pointed out that this heavy-handed censorship scared the sh*t out of people.

‘Since then, trust in media has fallen off a cliff,’ Zuckerberg agreed. ‘Our government is telling us that we need to censor true things … this is a disaster.’

‘The reaction to Covid probably caused a breakdown in trust in a lot of governments around the world.’

And what was the response of these governments to a loss of trust? The almost unanimous passing of censorship legislation under the lie of ‘child safety’.

I am no cheerleader for Zuckerberg, but he comes across as a person who has been on a sharp learning curve and settled down on a policy position closer to Musk than Biden.

This is important for the future of social media and free speech globally, because Musk is going to need powerful friends and market support as legislators come for him. Both the EU and UK have toyed with the idea of banning X or arresting Musk. These threats are made more difficult with Facebook onside. What happens to a politician that bans X and Facebook? An election disaster, I imagine.

‘The US government should be defending its companies, not the tip of the spear attacking them … when the US government goes after its tech industry, it’s open season around the world. The EU has fined tech companies more than $30 billion over the last 10 or 20 years.’

If Trump holds true to his America First promise, and moves to protect Silicon Valley from foreign governments who use tech companies as a debit card, we may see the whole industry switch colours.

And then the winds of culture will well and truly be blowing a gale.