Facebook has long been criticized by its competitors for shutting down free speech and censoring content. And the latest entrant to the social media market, Parler, has made a name for itself by lobbing these critiques at the social media giant while saying that it won’t do anything to police what users say.

According to a recent report in The New York Times, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tweaked his platform’s algorithm following the 2020 election to downgrade “hyperpartisan” content. That caused Parler CEO John Matze to respond, slamming Facebook for its willingness to run a “secret” internal system.

“So for me, this kind of Facebook secret internal algorithm thing is kind of Orwellian,” Matze said, comparing Facebook’s policy tweak to dystopian censorship. For its part, Facebook hit back forcefully, saying that the Times story is based on faulty sources without a firm idea how the company’s algorithms actually work.

“The assertions in this report are based on sources who have no product decision-making authority and are advancing their own narrow impression of how our process works,” Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne said in a statement.

While you obviously have to take anything Facebook’s competitors say with a grain of salt, there’s some truth to the fact that the company controls far too much of how speech is regulated online. Different social media platforms might not be the solution, but it is clear that something needs to change.

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