Don’t let Facebook off the hook for its pro-censorship past so easily

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, overlord of Facebook’s war on speech, just offered a mea culpa.

In a video posted Tuesday, Zuck announced that Meta is dropping its third-party fact-checking system, which he acknowledged is riddled with lefty bias, and replace it with X-style “community notes.”

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said, admitting that the content-moderation system had “shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas” and “gone too far.”

It’s a win for open discourse and more evidence that the left’s vice-tight grip on cultural spaces is weakening.

And give Zuck points for warning that the free-speech battle is global, with Europe still headed the wrong way: “The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.”

But Zuckerberg has a lot to atone for; a “sorry about that!” isn’t going to cut it.

And he can’t heap all of the blame on faceless, nameless “fact-checkers.”

His own execs were the ones deciding to ban Donald Trump and kowtow to the FBI and other forces within the Biden Justice Department, which pressured the company to silence accounts that posted content that ran afoul of the Democrats’ agenda, including The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden.

Zuck may be a free-speech warrior now, but back in 2020, Facebook bragged about slapping 50 million COVID-related posts with a warning label, including posts suggesting the virus was man-made — a theory now backed by mountains of evidence.

In fact, right up until Zuckerberg began feeling the heat from Congress over Facebook’s content-moderation standards, it was treating censorship as a public good.

It wasn’t suppressing free speech! It was just preventing “misinformation from spreading” and keeping “people safe from harmful content.”

Facebook and Instagram are massive platforms with huge impact on what people see, know and think, so Zuckerberg’s pro-speech course-correction is welcome.

But Meta’s years-long effort to stomp on speech in order to stay in the good graces of the Biden administration, and the left in general, had consequences he can’t fix with a simple apology.

Don’t let him off the hook so easily.