Photo: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In a shameless act of genuflection toward the incoming Trump administration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his social media platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — will be getting rid of fact-checking partners and replacing them with a “community notes” model like that found on X.
There could be little doubt about whom Meta aimed to please with these changes: Donald Trump and his far-right political movement.
In a video message explaining the announcement, Zuckerberg framed the new policies in the Republican lexicon of “free expression” against “censorship,” echoing right-wing talking points about how the social media platform’s third-party fact checkers have been prone to “political bias.”
And ending the fact-checking program was a direct demand of Trump’s pick for Federal Communications Commission chair and current FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, according to The Verge.
Then there was the venue: News of the changes was first shared by Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan in an exclusive on “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite show.
Zuckerberg and his executives’ naked pandering is worthy of contempt. As is the tech mogul’s decision last month to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Zuck is just one of the most prominent Silicon Valley billionaires making moves to lick the president-elect’s boots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon both donated $1 million to the Trump fund. And Elon Musk’s ultra-MAGA performance needs no mention. There’s nothing surprising about the machinations of the mega-rich when it comes to aligning with power.
When it comes to shifting their businesses to be less accountable, the full effects remain to be seen, but we can be confident it will poison the discourse with even more right-wing garbage.
Meta platforms will now follow in the footsteps of X and become more filled with unchecked, reliably racist conspiracy theories, a proliferation of neo-Nazi accounts, hate speech, and violence. Zuckerberg himself admitted in his announcement that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff.”
Liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking.
None of this, though, should lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about the value of social media fact-checking, or fact-checking more broadly, when it comes to combating the far right and the appeal of its conspiratorial world view. For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking.
A case in point is Trump’s forthcoming second term itself: He won back the White House while spewing unfounded, racist lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets, among other falsehoods — lies that were again and again debunked by every establishment media outlet.
An entire liberal cottage industry of fact-checking Trump and his allies on news and social media, even removing Trump from major social media platforms, did not diminish his support nor expunge dangerous disinformation from the echo chambers primed to receive and propagate it.
The end of the fact check era, however, is worth examining because of how it heralds another liberal failure with little to offer in the way of alternatives. It is just another capitulation in the battle against fascism. Liberals, it turned out, were never really the “resistance” that they pretended they were.
The idea that Zuckerberg is acting out of a renewed, conveniently timed commitment to “free speech” is laughable, and we’d be wise to expect further bending to Trump and Republican whims.
Big Fact Check
Facebook introduced its third-party fact-checking program in 2016, following Trump’s first election victory. The system relied on 90 organizations worldwide to address “viral misinformation.”
In 2021, in response to Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol attack, Meta banned the then-president from its platforms. Around that time, over 800 QAnon conspiracy groups were also removed from Facebook. Social media censorship became a hot button for the grievance-driven Trump and his far right.
None of the right-wing’s agenda, however, was about free speech for all. Consider that, at the same time, the right was rallying behind book bans in schools. They didn’t utter a peep when, as The Intercept reported in 2020, dozens of left-wing and antifascist groups were also banned from Facebook. And Meta has been engaging in what Human Rights Watch called “systematic and global” censorship of Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity content on its platforms.
Nonetheless, the right has successfully created a victim narrative out of content moderation.
The right has successfully created a victim narrative out of content moderation.
Enter Zuckerberg and the utter lack of subtlety in his announcement. These new policies were clearly not meant to serve the political left or censored pro-Palestinian users. “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” Zuckerberg said, issuing a thinly veiled signal that anti-trans, anti-immigrant hate would face fewer roadblocks.
With history as a guide, it’s hard to imagine that pro-Palestinian speech, alongside speech for environmental, racial, and gender justice won’t face policing under a Trump administration. The Republican-led Congress is already chafing at the bit to condemn such activism as terrorism.
Smashing Liberal Shibboleths
On the eve of Trump’s second term, liberal shibboleths about speaking truth to power are worse than outdated. Meta imitating X’s permissive approach to right-wing fearmongering is not a welcome development, nor is the loss of funding that journalistic and research organizations got for partnering with Meta on fact checks. Yet fact checks were never going to deliver us from the political context in which far-right propaganda thrives — one of alienation, austerity, inequality, and fearfulness.
I’m not the first to point out that narratives about the current scourge of disinformation, largely propagated by establishment media outlets fearful of their diminished authority, failed to account for why certain conspiracies and falsehoods were able to appeal to huge but specific swaths of the population.
Disinformation, though, has been a convenient narrative for a Democratic establishment unwilling to reckon with its own role in upholding anti-immigrant narratives, or repeating baseless fearmongering over crime rates, and failing to support the multiracial working class.
In an essay questioning popular narratives around “big disinformation,” Joe Bernstein recounted that posts labeled as false by Facebook only saw an 8 percent reduction in sharing — showing how the designation doesn’t stop information from spreading. Bernstein noted that the story of disinformation was one that tech giants could use to their advantage, as its very premise — that social media content has a nearly all-powerful ability to convince and persuade users — is a helpful narrative when appealing to advertisers. It’s also largely unfounded.
The persuasion power of social media posts has been overstated, while the political, socioeconomic contexts in which conspiracies thrive has been significantly understated in the disinformation discourse. QAnon appeals disproportionately to evangelicals, for instance, and Covid skepticism gained a foothold because of the experiences that formed Americans’ opinions of public health authorities. “There is nothing magically persuasive about social-media platforms,” Bernstein wrote.
The nails are firmly in the coffin, and the coffin has been buried — so long dead is the idea that social media platforms like X or Instagram are either trustworthy news publishers, sites for liberatory community building, or hubs for digital democracy. Instead, we need to think about the internet as a place driven exactly by the motives of the people who own — and profit from — these platforms.
“The internet may once have been understood as a commons of information, but that was long ago,” wrote media theorist Rob Horning in a recent newsletter. “Now the main purpose of the internet is to place its users under surveillance, to make it so that no one does anything without generating data, and to assure that paywalls, rental fees, and other sorts of rents can be extracted for information that may have once seemed free but perhaps never wanted to be.”
Social media platforms are huge corporations for which we, as users, produce data to be mined as a commodity to sell to advertisers — and — and government agencies. The CEOs of these corporations are craven and power-hungry.
Zuckerberg, lest we forget, is still facing an antitrust Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over claims that Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition. Luckily for him, Trump responds well to bootlicking.
