Meta has announced a change to their content moderation policies, admitting previous policies have gone too far and fact checkers “have destroyed more trust than they created.” Mark Zuckerberg called the recent election a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
Nowhere is the battle over free speech more intense than in higher education, which is struggling to deal with antisemitic rhetoric. This comes after many years of these same elite institutions ostracizing conservative voices on college campuses. Our data from last April showed only 19% of the electorate approving of how colleges and universities have handled campus protests. The inability to effectively deal with free speech comes in part from organizations like these and others running elite-based strategies that promoted preferred narratives that skewed left, treating the rest of the country as irrelevant. But the rest of America roared back in the November election against opposition from elites.
As our data has shown, concerns over free speech are not new and are not limited to conservatives. From work we did in July 2020, a majority of the electorate (52%) identified with the statement that true free speech and freedom of belief do not exist in this country today because of political correctness and potential consequences such as losing a job for not conforming to beliefs and narratives being promoted by the media, academia and elites. Only 34% believed that “free speech and freedom of belief exist in this country” and said they were free to speak their minds. Across party and ideology, liberal Democrats were the only voter group who felt free to express their beliefs at work or in social situations.
Many companies and institutions remain out of touch because they simply do not have enough representation of conservatives in decision-making, rarely hearing from this perspective. Now they may find themselves out in the cold in Washington with Republicans having control of the White House, Senate and House.
In the last election, exit polls showed that 16% of the electorate identified as liberal Democrat. 24% of the electorate identified as conservative Republican. That translates into 12.4 million more conservative Republicans than liberal Democrats at a national level. But a much larger portion of the electorate — 60% — were “everyone else” who did not identify with either party’s base. This group translates into over 93 million Americans who voted in the November election — 31.7 million more than the two party bases combined. However, there are more conservative Republicans than liberal Democrats in the country, meaning America is center-right.
Organizations will have to find a way to balance ideological diversity by ensuring they do not underrepresent conservatives, but also engage those who don’t identify with either party base so that their voices are heard in public discourse.
