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When a public determine spends an excessive amount of time repeating a specific platitude, strenuously pledging to be for<\/em> that which nobody might presumably be in opposition to, it\u2019s an indication that the general public determine is being evasive, disingenuous, or worse. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Fb, gave a speech at Georgetown College. Fb\u2019s official P.R. weblog posted Zuckerberg\u2019s ready remarks below the headline \u201cMark Zuckerberg Stands for Voice and Free Expression\u201d; a subtitle added that Zuckerberg endorsed \u201cthe significance of defending free expression.\u201d That\u2019s one repetition, even earlier than clicking via to learn.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg\u2019s speech\u2014streamed, naturally, on Fb Stay\u2014was practically forty minutes lengthy. The situation, Georgetown\u2019s Gaston Corridor, appeared supposed to evoke each Fb\u2019s relatable roots (school!) and its subsequent ascent to gravitas (darkish wooden, stained glass, proximity to Capitol Hill). Zuckerberg wore a black long-sleeve shirt\u2014the Hacker Approach equal of formalwear\u2014and skim from two teleprompters, including studied pauses and hand gestures. His thesis was that free speech is nice. In fact, everybody other than Kim Jong Un agrees with this; the query is whether or not free speech is the one good value pursuing, and whether or not it leads inexorably to reality and progress. \u201cThe flexibility to talk freely has been central within the struggle for democracy worldwide,\u201d Zuckerberg mentioned. \u201cWhen individuals are lastly in a position to communicate, they usually name for change.\u201d<\/p>\n As I argued in The New Yorker<\/em><\/a> final month, this kind of blithe techno-utopian narrative \u201cisn\u2019t solely mistaken, nevertheless it leaves out rather a lot.\u201d Zuckerberg alluded to Frederick Douglass\u2019s \u201cPlea for Freedom of Speech in Boston\u201d however failed to say Douglass\u2019s equally essential assertion, in \u201cWhat to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,\u201d that freedom of speech is hardly the one sort of freedom that issues. (\u201cTo pull a person in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and name upon him to affix you in joyous anthems, had been inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony,\u201d Douglass wrote.) Elsewhere in his speech, Zuckerberg made a passing reference to the printing press. As he at all times does, he used it as a metonym for the inevitable march of progress\u2014made solely extra environment friendly by nice males of historical past, reminiscent of Johannes Gutenberg and Mark Zuckerberg. However the printing press didn\u2019t solely result in progress. It additionally led to anti-Semitic violence, the unfold of medical misinformation, and a few century of spiritual wars. In my piece final month, I wrote that Zuckerberg has lengthy portrayed himself as a liberator, taking energy from gatekeepers and redistributing it to the folks. He has at all times emphasised the nice results of this redistribution, reminiscent of Egypt\u2019s democratic rebellion in 2011, whereas ignoring the much less nice results, reminiscent of Egypt\u2019s subsequent descent into theocracy and proto-autocracy. Now that the record of nations struggling below proto-autocratic management has grown to incorporate India, the Philippines, Brazil, and the US\u2014and provided that that is no random quirk of historical past however one attributable, largely, to Fb itself\u2014it\u2019s gone time for Zuckerberg to give you a brand new ideology, or a minimum of a brand new branding technique.<\/p>\n