We should not conclude that the changes Facebook is making to its content moderation are going to be permanent if they are a response to one election.

It’s possible to welcome the salubrious shifts in corporate behavior we’ve seen from places like Silicon Valley in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and to be disturbed by the degree to which private enterprise feels it must get right with the people in power if is to avoid negative outcomes.

I don’t take issue with anything Charlie has written here. It’s highly likely that Facebook’s decision to shift to an X-style fact-checking regime moderated by the community — thus, outsourcing responsibility for potentially erroneous checks onto a nebulous “community” — is primarily a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s competitors in the social-media space. But it’s also unlikely that Zuckerberg is wholly unresponsive to the threats to his firm Trump has retailed for years.

As recently as last month, Trump — himself, a social-media proprietor — told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that he’s lost his taste for reining in TikTok. Rather, “I’m going to try and make it so that other companies don’t become an even bigger monopoly,” he said. Facebook has already been on the receiving end of a similar campaign of coercion led by the Biden administration. If Zuckerberg’s preemptive effort to ingratiate himself with the incoming GOP administration is a learned behavior resulting from his experience enduring governmental coercion, it should dampen the right’s enthusiasm for this otherwise welcome development.

Indeed, we should not conclude that the changes Facebook is making to its content moderation are going to be permanent if they are a response to one election. If the censorious regime to which the institution committed itself at the end of the last decade was an outgrowth of the Left’s political capture of the institution and the sense that Democrats would soon control the levers of power, we can expect to see the pendulum shift again along with the political winds. And given the extent to which companies like Amazon, OpenAI, Google, Apple, and a host of other tech firms with unresolved business before the federal courts have attempted to endear themselves to Washington’s new masters, we cannot say that this development was a product of an epiphany that occurred to Zuckerberg alone.

This is all a rational response to a government that enjoys far too much power and influence over private commercial enterprises. If the prevailing corporate culture in America must reflect whatever the party in power in Washington believes, we should withhold that third cheer for Zuckerberg’s maneuver. Democrats won’t be out of power forever.