“Free Speech” Haven Facebook Blocking Internal Criticism of Trump Ally

Within hours of announcing Meta’s policy changes to return the company to its “roots of free expression,” the company has already begun censoring criticism from its own employees, 404 Media reported.

Meta’s “Internal Community Relations team” deleted several posts made by employees criticizing the recent decision to add Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White—a close ally of Donald Trump—to Meta’s board of directors, the outlet revealed Tuesday.

While the response from employees was mixed overall, several were outspoken about their disappointment. While one joked that UFC fighter Connor McGregor would be next to join the company, another employee remarked that it was “kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape,” referring to White and McGregor, respectively.

“I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on White and concluded that what he did is fine. I feel like I’m on another planet,” wrote a third employee.

Several posts criticizing White were supposedly deleted because they had violated the “Community Engagement Expectations,” or CEE, rules that govern the internal communications between employees.

“I’m posting a comment here with a reminder about the CEE, as multiple comments have been flagged by the community for review,” wrote one member of the Internal Community Relations team in a thread, which explained why posts had been deleted. “It’s important that we maintain a respectful work environment where people can do their best work. We need to keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community—including members of our Board. Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE.”

Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, told 404 Media that posts that were critical but did not violate the CEE had not been taken down. Clayton emphasized that the internal and external moderation policies were completely separate.

The censorship feels particularly hypocritical considering that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company’s platforms would no longer use third-party fact-checking services, in favor of community notes. They would also dial back content filters, allow more discussion around topics such as gender and immigration, and raise the threshold for removing a post—all changes that directly benefit right-wing speech.

Meta’s policy chief said that the announcement was inspired by Trump’s return to the White House, and even Trump speculated that the decision had “probably” been in response to threats he made against Zuckerberg.

White’s installation at the top of a major social media company signals a big shift in corporations toward appeasing both Trump specifically and the larger manosphere in general.

Donald Trump’s acolytes in the House of Representatives are so jazzed about his forthcoming administration that they’re practically handing him the reins to resume manifest destiny.

In a since-deleted tweet posted on Wednesday, the official account for the House GOP challenged the patriotism of the president-elect’s foreign policy detractors, claiming that denying Trump’s “big dreams” for the country was “un-American.”

“Our country was built by warriors and explorers,” the official House GOP wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “We tamed the West, won two World Wars, and were the first to plant our flag on the moon.

“President Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it’s un-American to be afraid of big dreams,” they wrote.

The message was circulated alongside the New York Post’s front page, which featured a caricature of Trump standing in front of a map of the Western hemisphere with America’s geographical neighbors rebranded as part of America.

Trump has escalated a laughless joke in recent weeks that Canada and Greenland should be absorbed into the United States, making them states under the American banner. But the bully behavior ends where foreign countries begin to take the threat seriously: Trump has also advanced the idea that the U.S. should take the Panama Canal from Panama. That alone has prompted the leader of the Panama Canal Authority to warn that Trump’s rhetoric “will lead to chaos.”

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales sternly rebutted Trump’s claim that China was getting preferential rates to use the vital trade route.

“Rules are rules and there are no exceptions,” Vásquez Morales said. “We cannot discriminate for the Chinese, or the Americans, or anyone else. This will violate the neutrality treaty, international law and it will lead to chaos.”

Donald Trump’s crazy idea to annex Greenland to the United States seems to have an unlikely supporter: Democratic Senator John Fetterman.

Fetterman appeared on Fox News on Tuesday with Republican Senator Katie Britt, and when the topic of Greenland came up, Fetterman didn’t dismiss the idea.

“There’s a lot of talk about Greenland, for example, and … there’s a lot of freak-outs, and, of course, I would never support taking it by force,” Fetterman said. He added that discussing the territory’s annexation would be a “responsible conversation,” including “just buying it out.”

“If anyone thinks that’s bonkers, it’s like, well, remember the Louisiana Purchase?” Fetterman said.

Trump will probably be very happy with Fetterman’s words. The president-elect keeps pushing half-baked plans of annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal zone, and his son even visited Greenland on Tuesday. But the Danish-controlled territory and Denmark’s leaders say that the island isn’t for sale, and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned Wednesday that the European Union would not tolerate an attack on its “sovereign borders.”

Fetterman’s reaction to Trump’s idea seems to be part of a pattern by the Pennsylvania senator, who has boasted about shifting away from progressive politics for more than a year. Pennsylvania’s only Democratic senator even bragged that brain damage resulting from his near-fatal stroke has allowed him to “say the things that I have to really believe in and not be afraid of if there’s any kind of blowback.”

If Trump actively pursues annexing Greenland, or any other territory, after he is sworn in, there certainly will be blowback, both in the U.S. and abroad. What will Fetterman and other Democrats who have chosen to appease Trump say then?

Republicans are using the devastating California wildfires as an excuse to score cheap political points against Democrats and Governor Gavin Newsom, rather than focusing on providing sorely needed assistance.

Multiple wildfires are burning through Los Angeles County, killing two people and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. President-elect Trump called the fires “virtually apocalyptic.”

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration.… He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this.”

Elon Musk retweeted a conservative account attacking Newsom, while presidential envoy Richard Grenell tweeted, “The far left policies of Democrats in California are literally burning us to the ground. Stop voting for people who won’t use common sense water management and forest policies. I’m pissed off. You should be, too.”

Governor Newsom struck back on Tuesday. “My message to the incoming administration—and I’m not here to play any politics—is please don’t play any politics,” he said. “There’s a time and place for that.… The precious moments we have to evacuate, we don’t have any time for that mishegoss.”

There’s a lot of finger pointing coming from a party that has ignored climate change for decades while continuing to invest in the very fossil fuel industry that is helping warm our climate and heavily influencing this irregular weather pattern in the process.

Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested Tuesday that the Department of Justice scale back the president’s power to use the U.S. military domestically.

In a letter on behalf of the committee Democrats, Durbin urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to “withdraw certain legal opinions by The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) relating to the allocation of war powers and foreign relations powers between Congress and the president.

“I request that the Department of Justice publicly release opinions and manuals pertaining to the domestic use of the U.S. military,” Durbin wrote. “For decades, OLC has issued guidance on the circumstances in which the President may deploy the military within the United States, as well as what servicemembers may do when so deployed.

“The American people have a right to know how the Executive Branch interprets the President’s constitutional and statutory authority to use the military domestically,” Durbin continued. “The need for transparency regarding these legal interpretations is particularly urgent today given the risk of domestic military deployment to suppress protests or carry out mass deportations.”

In a post on X, the committee Democrats alleged that there were five “flawed opinions” that had “run afoul of Congress’s critical check on presidential war powers” that needed to be rescinded.

It seems that Durbin and Senate Democrats are hoping to rein in Trump’s military powers ahead of his return to the White House later this month. Trump has previously claimed he will use the military to conduct sweeping raids as part of his mass deportation scheme. He has also threatened to turn the U.S. military against his political enemies and even foreign allies.