Facebook will make it easier for politicians to hide their wildest beliefs

A pair of doors.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Facebook will tweak its content moderation policies, the social network announced Friday, ending some special leeway for politicians. Previously, elected officials were granted a newsworthiness exception for content that would be removed — or even result in account suspension — if shared by ordinary users. That exception will be granted far more rarely and transparently going forward.

I'm not convinced deleting politicians' posts is a good idea. It's not that it's all newsworthy: Five years of former President Donald Trump's tweets disabused me of the old journalistic assumption of inherent official newsworthiness. Nor do I think Facebook should be forced to host this stuff. But I do see in Facebook a useful temptation to politicians who believe false, unethical, and otherwise objectionable things: a place to announce to the voting public views they might otherwise manage to conceal. Shouldn't we want to know if people seeking or holding positions of power believe false or unethical things? Isn't that crucial information about how they'll wield their power?

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.