Should we hail Mark Zuckerberg as a truth teller ... this late in the game?

Facebook founder and Meta CEO got a lot of attention this week for finally 'fessing up to colluding with the government to censor the speech of his customers. Zuckerberg's letter offers his "regrets," as Jazz notes skeptically, for Facebook's rush to bend the knee to Big Brother and ludicrous "fact checking" schemes by the mainstream media. That's true of both COVID-19 discussion, Zuckerberg admits, and the McCarthy-esque effort to paint exposure of Biden family corruption as "Russian disinformation."

Please note, however, that it took Zuckerberg at least three years to see the light on both tracks. As John McClane might say:

Matt Taibbi sees this letter as a bombshell against government overreach, however. In an essay titled "Zuckerberg Defies the Borg," Taibbi sees this letter as more than just a belated CYA. He reminds readers that Zuckerberg has potential liabilities that are not just domestic political concerns, but actual criminal-prosecution threats in Europe as liberty's sun sets on the Continent. Pavel Durov just found out the hard way that EU censors and their member-states are deadly serious about quashing free speech and political dissent. 

As Taibbi also points out, American political figures are pushing in the same direction. That battalion of the Borg have already targeted bigger figures than Zuckerberg, Taibbi reminds us:

There are potent warnings in the letter, the most obvious being the “reporting was not Russian disinformation” portion. On August 6, 2020, the FBI briefed Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, warning both that by investigating the Hunter Biden/Burisma story, they were advancing a “Russian disinformation” campaign. Worse, government sources subsequently leaked news of that briefing to the Washington Post, which then reported that the Republican Senators had been given a “defensive briefing” by the FBI in part to see “how they respond” to being informed their investigation was seen as advancing Russian interests. “They’re now on notice,” is how former FBI official-turned-media-sleazeball Frank Figliuzzi put it.

Zuckerberg’s letter touches on this larger story. The FBI involved itself in electoral politics by lying to business leaders and Congress about the origin of the Burisma tale. Senators Johnson and Grassley were bluntly threatened, informed that the FBI considered their investigation to be in service of a Russian plot and put “on notice” that their behavior going forward would be monitored. Was Facebook similarly “warned”? What would that record look like? What would Zuckerberg say about it, if he could give a frank and extended interview?

This edges up to my more skeptical point, but Taibbi's penultimate paragraph gets even closer:

Zuckerberg putting “censor” in writing forces the Dana Bashes of the world to start adding the Meta CEO to their already bloated list of Putin-loving right-wing fabulists. This technique is already stretched beyond the limits of plausibility, and a full defection from the Bullshit Cartel of Zuckerberg — whose internal analysts surely have a more accurate read on the population’s leanings than any poll agency — would make continued dismissals of censorship claims all but impossible. Were he to give full evidence to someone like Jordan, it would make the Twitter Files look like a mild appetizer.

Indeed it would. So ... why hasn't Zuckerberg done that? He certainly has the authority to do it -- Facebook/Meta is his company, and its market position is nearly unassailable. 

Compare this to Elon Musk, whose $44 billion acquisition of a social-media platform made the Twitter Files possible. Musk is wealthier than Zuckerberg, but only marginally. Furthermore, Twitter/X does not command the same kind of market dominance over similar messaging services; Zuckerberg's Instagram and WhatsApp compete effectively against it, as does the CCP-influenced TikTok. On top of that, Musk had a lot more to risk by angering the US arm of the Borg; his SpaceX is a major government contractor, and both SpaceX and Tesla are much more vulnerable to government regulation and enforcement than any of Zuckerberg's enterprises.

And yet, Musk not only revealed all of what Zuckerberg admits or suggests in the letter, he spent $44 billion of his own money to expose it. And he did so immediately upon acquisition, not three years down the road, and only when a House committee had subpoenaed enough of Facebook's internal documents to make denials implausible. Ever since the Twitter Files, Musk has made himself far more of a target for US and EU regulators, and he's still standing tall and fighting back against censorship. This month, he shuttered Twitter/X operations in Brazil rather than be forced into colluding with government to silence dissent.

Meanwhile ... it took Zuckerberg three years to write a mea culpa. And he didn't even name names while doing so, as my friend Scott Johnson points out at Power Line:

Zuckerberg’s mea culpa is tardy. He names no names. The FBI perpetrators remain at large, as do the Deep State 51 who emerged to support the FBI censorship campaign. Nevertheless, it is good to have the letter on the record.

Well, it doesn't hurt, but otherwise it's a nothingburger. If Zuckerberg wanted to truly repent, he would open his correspondence records in the same way Musk did, and expose both the corruption and those participating in it. That's what it will take to end Big Brother in the US, and that would truly inform Americans about the nature of the Big Tech/Big Brother Censorship Complex that has arisen in the last several years in defiance of the US Constitution. 

Until then, Zuckerberg only deserves credit for running a PR campaign to keep his customers from abandoning his platform. 

Addendum: Plus, we should hear from Zuckerberg whether he's still funding Arabella, the progressive network of wealthy donors. It's this stealth billionaire clique that pushed the Russian disinformation nonsense and demanded censorship action on dissent and political organizing. Will Zuckerberg renounce Arabella ... or does he just plan to fund them more quietly in the future?

Addendum II: Matt Taibbi's Racket News really is worth the subscription price. I don't always agree, and today's one of those times, but Taibbi always has an interesting and worthwhile argument to make. And today's one of those times too. 

Update: Some Facebook correspondence had leaked out last year. Robby Soave covered the story and analyzed the implications in March 2023 for Reason:

According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. "Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all," reads one note from a CDC official. Another email with sample Facebook posts attached begins: "BOLO for a small but growing area of misinfo." ...

Facebook is a private entity, and thus is within its rights to moderate content in any fashion it sees fit. But the federal government's efforts to pressure social media companies cannot be waved away. A private company may choose to exclude certain perspectives, but if the company only takes such action after politicians and bureaucrats threaten it, reasonable people might conclude the choice was an illusion. Such an arrangement—whereby private entities, at the behest of the government, become ideological enforcers—is unacceptable. And it may be illegal.

Be sure to read it all. That is indeed a start, but it also appeared to be an end to disclosures from Facebook. Soave doesn't reveal his source(s), as he shouldn't in whistleblower exposés such as this, so it might have come from Zuckerberg, although the 17 months between then and his letter suggests otherwise. It might have also come from people within Facebook, or even from the House committee members investigating censorship. Zuckerberg needs to do the kind of full-scale transparency and accountability measures that Musk took to expose Big Brother now.