Today’s statement from Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram, among other things), is a remarkable cultural artifact. If Zuckerberg means even half of what he says in it, we may well be seeing a genuine shift in how Silicon Valley regards free speech, dissent, and pluralism.

As NBC notes:

Zuckerberg said that Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.

But it is how this is to be done that is so interesting. In his address, Zuckerberg announced that his moderation teams would be moved from California to Texas; he mentioned “immigration” and “gender” as two topics on which those who enforce Meta’s rules had proven to be out of touch with the American middle; he suggested that “the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech”; and he distinguished between “social media” and “legacy media.” Indirectly referencing Blackstone, he concluded by accepting that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

These are no weasel words. Nor can Zuckerberg wriggle out of them without his reversal being obvious. In essence, Zuckerberg just told his company and its peers that they are living in a censorious bubble, and that they are at serious risk of becoming exiles in the country they supposedly serve.

Certainly, some of what Zuckerberg said is the product of competition from Elon Musks’s X, and of a desire to stay on the right side of figures in both parties who would like to break up companies such as Meta. But that doesn’t change the fact that the pressure to which he’s responding is real, and nor does it make his description of his staff’s parochialism any less true. For more than a decade now, many people within both social media and “legacy media” have attempted to use their power to end debate on a host of important democratic issues. This has failed — and spectacularly so. Even if one regards Zuckerberg’s shift as a purely cynical surrender, performed by a malleable and amoral cipher, one ought to be pleased at the impetus that provoked it. Something is changing out there — and changing for the better.