POLITICS: Don’t fall for the censorship industrial complex’s superficial makeover

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is smart to shake up leadership ahead of the Trump inauguration, but it hardly means the censorship industrial complex is done.

Zuck gave the boot to top exec Nick Clegg, the Brit behind Facebook’s silencing of right-wing voices, and is replacing him as president of global affairs with Joel Kaplan, a Republican sure to be far more palatable to the incoming White House and GOP-majority Congress.

Clegg, a former left-liberal hack British politician, absolutely needed axing: It was under his leadership that Facebook banned Donald Trump, suppressed The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and removed posts suggesting that COVID was man-made.

But changing the public face of Meta is no guarantee that Facebook will become a permanent rock of free speech.

The company remains riddled with lefty bas, from top execs who donated thousands to President Biden’s campaign to underlings who clamored for Trump’s posts to be scrubbed from the site.

And nothing prevents Zuck from tilting back to the Clegg era if Democrats regain DC power the “anti-disinformation” lies of the pro-censorship elite.

The censorship industrial complex that thrived under the Biden administration is huge, stretching through a host of “nonprofits” as well as a web of federal agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which worked quietly with social media sites to censor dissent.

Congress last month defunded the GEC, but the lame-duck Bidenites sent half its employees and budget to a Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub likely to do the same shady, anti-speech work.

That will give the worst censors time to find new gigs to wait out Trump’s term, at places like UK not-for-profit Global Disinformation Index, which created a “blacklist” of conservative publications, including The Post.

Heck, the British Labour Party, which funded key “anti-disinfo” institutions and propaganda over the last decade, now rules the United Kingdom, and will keep backing the poisonous global movement, especially across the English-speaking world.

Team Trump is firmly anti-censorship; Elon Musk burned billions to free users’ speech at Twitter (now X).

But the censorship industrial complex still penetrated the federal government deeply in the first Trump term — heck, it used federal power to set up and then execute the suppression of our laptop reporting in those years.

The White House and Congress can’t fall for superficial paint-jobs ) like a single Meta exec-shake-up, or the disbanding of one State agency) that barely cover the rot below: The nation (and the world) need hearings and Executive branch purges — lots and lots of sunshine and naming of names — or the censorship menace won’t even go into hibernation.