Mark Zuckerberg is overhauling his Metaverse.

The 40-year-old CEO rocked the business world recently, announcing that Meta (parent company of Facebook) would be phasing out its third-party fact-checking feature in favor of an option closer to X’s Community Notes, ending one of the platform’s most criticized features and kiboshing one of the Babylon Bee’s most consistent sources of content. And that wasn’t even the end of Meta’s about-face: the company announced shortly afterward that it would be ending many of its DEI initiatives, including supplier diversity programs, and sunsetting its actual DEI team. Is the biggest social media platform on Earth embracing free speech? (RELATED: Facebook Ends Dubious Fact-Checking. Biden Objects.)
Unsurprisingly, the reaction to this turn of events has been highly skeptical from both the right and the left. Zuckerberg “has opened the door to prejudice and bigotry, given a green flag for attacks on the vulnerable, with no checks and balances,” rants former Twitter curator Marc Burrows. On the right, Federalist contributor Jordan Boyd argued that “Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to give Facebook’s key role in the censorship industrial complex a makeover.” Whatever the median reaction to Facebook’s new era may be, “open arms and believing minds” doesn’t exactly epitomize it. 
So, what are we to make of the new and arguably improved Meta? As someone who talks to corporations about their biased policies for a living (including Meta less than a month ago), let’s have a serious tactical discussion about how to approach a company that has, for better or for worse, complied with government demands for censorship in the past and would now like you to believe that it’s a safe harbor for free expression. Can we trust Zuckerberg to keep his word? (RELATED: Meta’s Oversight Board Threatens Women’s Right to Sex-Based Protections)
The best answer for this is one of Ronald Reagan’s most popularized maxims: trust, but verify. And trust is a curren...