We may all become Americans soon if recurring nightmare Donald Trump has his way, but in the meantime, Meta’s move to stop fact checking user posts in the US may make us even less alike (fact checking of Facebook and Instagram posts in Canada will continue, according to the CBC). Republicans in the US have long complained that Meta’s fact checkers were biased against them and have preferred to instead construct their own version of reality based on what they call “alternative facts.” The root of the problem, as Stephen Colbert once observed, is that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Instead of truth, we get what Colbert called “truthiness,” which is based not so much on facts as on our perceptions, which are much easier to manipulate. No wonder so much of public relations nowadays is perception management, which was perfected by the White House in manufacturing support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely,” said Joel Kaplan, its Chief Global Affairs Officer, in announcing the change last week. “That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression.” Instead of fact checking posts, for which Meta had contracted with outside agencies since 2016, its Facebook and Instagram social networks in the US will henceforth be subject only to appended corrections from readers called Community Notes, similar to what Elon Musk’s X now allows. “Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” explained Kaplan. “A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.” Meta’s own content moderation team will meanwhile move from liberal California to redneck Texas, while “civic content” about elections, politics and social issues will be phased back in after having been phased out in 2021.

The move is widely seen as Meta trying to get out of Trump’s doghouse amid worldwide efforts to regulate it. Meta banned Trump from Facebook in 2020 after he fomented that year’s January 6 insurrection, but announced in 2022 that it would stop fact-checking his speeches ahead of his third presidential bid. “The normal state of affairs is that the public should be able to hear from a former President of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again, on our platforms,” it said at the time.

The notion that Meta’s fact checkers have been biased against conservatives was rejected by Nina Jankowicz, former head of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board of the US Department of Homeland Security. She argued on Bluesky that instead the fact checkers “have been perceived as such because of politically motivated efforts to smear them.” The end of fact checking on Meta’s US platforms is just another step in the digital giant’s efforts to obliterate reality, she added. “Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism and this will be the final nail in the coffin.” The liberal Guardian called the move “an extinction-level event for truth on social media,” but the conservative Wall Street Journal welcomed Meta’s decision to “abandon its censorship regime.” Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley lauded the move as potentially “transformational” for an anti-censorship movement being led by Musk. “For the free speech community, it was like the United States entering World War II to support Great Britain,” argued the Georgetown law professor. “Around the world, free speech is in a free fall. Speech crimes and censorship have become the norm in the West.”

Such hyperbole helps to point up the differences in Canadian and American attitudes toward free speech, and Meta’s move could prove a tipping point away from online censorship even in this country. Many Canadians seem to have a problem with allowing others to exercise free speech, as evidenced by last fall’s controversy over the film Russians at War, which portrayed Russian soldiers invading Ukraine as unfortunate ordinary sods thrust into a nightmare not of their own making. Despite Globe and Mail columnist Marsha Lederman calling it “an exceptional documentary” that “needs to be seen,” and Toronto Star columnist Andrew Phillips deeming it “the furthest thing from propaganda on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine you could imagine,” TVOntario pulled it from its broadcast schedule under pressure from the Ukrainian community.

Some in this country seem to take a “you can’t say that” approach to anything that doesn’t align with their preferred version of reality, and watching the film might cause them cognitive dissonance that would be difficult to reconcile with their worldview. Concerns over censorship in Canada have been heightened by the Trudeau government’s recent efforts to regulate the Internet with the Online Streaming Act and Online News Act, not to mention the as yet unpassed Online Harms Act. After the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission required that podcasters, adult websites and social media register with it under the Online Streaming Act, some Americans scorned the move, with journalist Glenn Greenwald claiming that Canada now has “one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes” and Musk tweeting that “Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada.” The illiberal tendency toward censorship on the part of some Liberals was exemplified by a proposal passed at the party’s 2023 policy convention calling for the government to “hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.”

The main difference in Canadian and American attitudes toward free speech is codified in our respective constitutions. Freedom of speech, and of the press, is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects even hate speech. Guarantees of free speech in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, on the other hand, extend only so far as they do not infringe on the rights of identifiable groups to not be subjected to hatred or contempt. The American remedy to the problem of hate speech is more speech, not less. This is the classic “marketplace of ideas” view of John Milton in Areopagitica, his argument against licensing and censorship in 17th century England.

“And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field. We do injuriously, by licencing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength,” wrote Milton. “Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter.”

The problem in Canada is that if we start telling each other what we can and cannot say, we might as well start decreeing what we all must think.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.