Has Facebook just given a major boost to antisemites? That’s the take of the Anti-Defamation League and other ideological liberal and left-wing Jewish groups about the decision of Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Meta, the company that runs Facebook, to end the social-media platform’s efforts to censor its users. As far as they are concerned, it will open the floodgates to a tsunami of online antisemitism, endangering Jews.
There’s little doubt that shutting down Meta’s censorship operation will make it easier for all sorts of haters to spread their bile on Facebook. But the notion that the real threat to Jewish life in 2025 comes from the sort of neo-Nazi Facebook posters that ADL and other Jewish liberal groups have been obsessing about for the last several years is risible.
To the contrary, this is a moment in history when the primary threat to Jewish security in the West is from the leftist allies of the censors who have mainstreamed antisemitism, coupled with calls for the elimination of Israel and the genocide of its people.
More to the point, it is supporters of Israel and Zionism—and their conservative allies—that have rightly opposed the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred in the name of “anti-racism” who are more likely to be shut down and censored by what writer Ben Weingarten has rightly termed the “disinformation industrial complex.”
A censorship regime
That alliance of partisan activists, government agencies, corporate media and Big Tech companies foisted a censorship regime on the Internet to aid their war on President-elect Donald Trump, conservative ideas and dissent against woke ideologies. However, organizations like the ADL, which under its current CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt, exchanged its old nonpartisan stance and mission for one allied to the Democrats, have played a minor, if crucial role in legitimizing censorship.
They did that in the name of opposing neo-Nazism and other Jew-haters. But in doing so, they not only undermined a basic principle of American democracy, which protects free speech. They also turned a blind eye to the way that the ideological left, which was behind the censorship project, was creating a hostile environment for Jews by their championing of toxic ideas like critical race theory and intersectionality. The ADL, whose mission is to defend Jews and American democracy, embraced extremist and antisemitic Black Lives Matter groups and the adoption of woke policies like critical race theory.
ADL’s betrayal
The left’s conquest of academia and other institutions served to legitimize discourse that falsely branded Israel and the Jews as “white oppressors.” They focused their advocacy almost exclusively on far-right extremists who had no real political influence and falsely tried to link them to Trump. On top of that, ADL not only ran interference for the censorship regime but assisted efforts by Silicon Valley to demonetize and censor conservatives.
And so, the ADL helped boost the same ideological forces in preparing the way for an unprecedented surge in antisemitism that has spread across the globe, especially in the United States, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, Greenblatt has tried to steer the group back to its original mission. But, like Zuckerberg, he deserves no credit for this volte-face.
The ADL has failed to make an effective contribution to the battle against woke antisemitic mobs chanting for genocide (“from the river to the sea”) and terrorism (“globalize the intifada”) on college campuses and elsewhere. That’s because it is still too wedded to its left-wing ideological and partisan allies to make a clean break and support the mainly conservative voices that seek to roll back that tide—something that could probably only be enabled by Trump’s return to power.
The ADL’s stance and that of other liberal groups is, of course, merely a sidebar to the general debate about the shift at Facebook.
Cynical billionaires
To liberal ideologues and Democratic partisans, Zuckerberg is, as the rabidly NeverTrump Bulwark website put it, “a surrender monkey.” They see it as just the latest example of cynical big-business types who have decided to make their peace with Trump because they fear his wrath.
Non-leftists see it differently. They view his move, similar to signals coming from some corporate media publishers like Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post along with Amazon, as an indication that such people understand that it is in their interests to move to the center.
Being in the pockets of the ideological left on issues like gender ideology, illegal immigration and COVID-19 policies—not to mention the obsession with delegitimizing Trump, and covering up for the corruption and diminished mental capacity of President Joe Biden—and censoring opposing views is not only wrong; it’s obviously bad for business in a country whose voters just handed unified control of Washington to Republicans this past November.
But both explanations can be correct.
Zuckerberg’s and Bezos’s only allegiance is to the cause of expanding their fortunes, which already number in the hundreds of billions. They are acting cynically but also listening to the verdict of the people.
Yet the end of Facebook’s censorship regime and its adoption of a system of “community notes,” which will provide a check on blatantly wrong or hateful posts in the same manner as X (formerly Twitter), owned by Elon Musk, signifies more than a desire to stay in the political mainstream. It’s a seminal victory for free speech.
The owners of the virtual public square, who have more power than media moguls of the past could ever have dreamed of possessing, have been putting their fingers on the scale to advance a specific set of ideological agendas, as well as the fortunes of Democrats. Their suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and his family’s corruption in the last weeks of the 2020 presidential election is one of the most shocking scandals in American political history, perhaps only rivaled in recent memory by their equal enthusiasm for covering up Biden’s mental decline.
Even worse was their collusion with the Biden administration to shut down dissenting views about COVID policies, some of which proved to be more truthful than the claims of government officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who claimed to speak for “science.” That seemed to herald a new era in which First Amendment rights to freedom of speech would be overridden by the government’s assertion of a duty to silence “misinformation,” a category of thought that suspiciously overlapped with much of conservative discourse.
The “fact-checkers” employed by Facebook, like Politifact, are thinly disguised partisans who are as likely to be guilty of spreading “misinformation” as the sources they have helped to censor.
DEI and Post-Oct. 7 antisemitism
Their efforts also dovetailed with the censorious culture driven by the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that shut down debate on college campuses, cultural forums and even journalistic outlets during the moral panic about race during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 and the years that followed.
While the DEI mindset—and the grip of critical race theory and intersectionality on institutions seemed to be irreversible—the American people had a different view of the issue. Revulsion against these repressive practices played a role in the 2024 campaign. Trump rode a wave of dissatisfaction with woke conformity and the contempt of the credentialed elites for traditional American values and the interests of working-class voters to victory over Biden’s replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s Jewish supporters have high hopes that he will direct the U.S. Department of Justice to combat DEI, as well as to defund institutions that enable antisemitism. But whatever one thinks of Trump or whether he will, as he did during his first term, keep his promises to the Jews and the pro-Israel community, if he has moved the needle sufficiently to persuade Big Tech to stop colluding with the left to promote censorship, that’s good for American democracy and the Jews.
Jews have thrived in America because it is a free country whose basic values are linked to the canon of Western civilization and where the rule of law is respected. Countries that shut down free speech or seek to criminalize political differences, such as the Democrats’ banana republic-style lawfare against Trump, are never truly safe for Jews.
The sensible center
More to the point, anyone who wants to perpetuate a censorship apparatus linked to the political left must reckon with the fact that the same ideologues behind this insidious practice are just as hostile to Jewish interests and rights as they are to Trump and conservative opponents of leftist orthodoxies.
Living in a country where there is a First Amendment and the government cannot, as they do in other democracies, ban speech by extremists who hate Jews means accepting that bad people have the right to say terrible things as long as they are not directly advocating and abetting violence. That’s the price of American democracy, but it is far outweighed by the benefits of the U.S. Constitution, which invariably aids the cause of freedom and diminishes those who oppose it.
By contesting the end of censorship on Facebook, the ADL and other liberals may claim that they are merely fighting neo-Nazis and other hate-mongers. But whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they are actually putting themselves on the wrong side of the battles against antisemitism and leftist authoritarianism, as well as outside of the sensible center of American society.