After Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to censorship on Meta through its third party fact-checking program, conservatives celebrated the move as a “huge win.” Fox News reports conservatives were quick to respond on social media as Zuckerberg admitted that content moderation on the platform had “gone too far.”

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X Tuesday morning, “Meta finally admits to censoring speech…what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech.”

Abigail Jackson, communications director for GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, also took to X writing, “There is absolutely 0 chance this would have happened if Trump didn’t win.”

The stance that Meta’s move was only possible with Trump’s win was expressed by others as well, but they left no doubt that regardless of the motives, the change in Meta’s policies is a move forward in the name of free speech.

According to Fox News, “Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to ‘manage content’ and misinformation on its platforms, largely due to ‘political pressure,’ executives said, but admitted the system has ‘gone too far.’”

In Meta’s announcement, they admit that the “independent fact-checking program” started in 2016, but claimed that they made it “very clear” that the platform “didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth.” However, Meta found that the fact-checkers had “their own biases and perspectives,” thus causing the “program intended to inform” to become “a tool to censor.”

Meta will still feature an approach to checking facts, but is doing so through a Community Notes program, which X uses to “empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.” The new approach will be phased in over the course of the year in the United States. According to Meta, the platform will not write any Community Notes or “decide which ones show up,” as they will be “written and rated by contributing users.”

The announcement follows a major effort by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) who, in August of 2023, launched an investigation into “a purported ‘misinformation’ tracking group he says engaged in ‘censorship’ of disfavored speech on social media alongside the Biden administration.”

The effort focused largely on Meta’s (Facebook’s) “close contact with the Biden administration on content moderation” to investigate the extent to which the federal government “coordinated with the private sector to flag certain speech…as ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation.’”

According to the New York Post, Jim Jordan praised Zuckerberg for taking the lead “upholding freedom of speech online.”

Jordan told The Post, “Today’s news from Mark Zuckerberg comes after our committee conducted rigorous oversight to protect the First Amendment […] Last August, Zuckerberg admitted to our committee that the Biden White House had pressured Facebook to censor Americans. Today is a huge step in the right direction.”

Other Big Tech companies should follow Meta in its move to uphold free speech online, Jordan added, highlighting Google in particular.