Censorship, like most totalitarian measures, has a way of backfiring.
After Trump's win, the media launched a "Fake News" campaign pressuring the big social media firms to censor pro-Trump media. (It's been quickly forgotten, but the "Fake News" slur was mainstreamed originally by this media campaign before Trump made it his own.) Part of that involved rolling lefty fact checkers into Facebook who would be able to mark stories as 'disputed'.
But that mark of authority backfired in an age when everyone questions authority.
Facebook announced that it will no longer use "Disputed Flags"— red flags next to fake news articles — to identify fake news for users. Instead it will use related articles to give people more context about a story.
The related articles will of course be mainstream media and their fact checker spin, but it's revealing why it failed.
Facebook says putting Related Articles next to fake news leads to fewer shares than when the Disputed Flag is shown. "Putting a strong image, like a red flag, next to an article may actually entrench deeply held beliefs – the opposite effect to what we intended," Facebook writes in a blog post.
So now Facebook is moving away from authoritatively informing people that they're wrong to nudging them by manipulating the algorithm. And that's a reminder of the limits of the left. The more openly the left asserts its authority, the greater the backlash against it.