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There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg did not consider the mainstream media to be the enemy. He even allowed me, a card-carrying media person, into his home. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear their plans to do the right thing. It was part of my Facebook embedding years to write a book. For the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company has been heavily criticized for its failure to curb misinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder had a plan to address this.
Part of the solution, he told me it was more moderation of content. It was going to involve a lot more humans to vet the posts, even if it cost Facebook considerable capital. It would also step up efforts to use artificial intelligence to proactively remove harmful content. “It’s no longer enough to give people the tools to say what they want and then let our community flag it and try to respond after the fact,” he told me as we sat in his sunroom. “We need to get in more and just take a more active role.” He admitted he was slow to realize how harmful toxic content was on Facebook, but was now committed to fixing the problem, even if it could take years. “I think we’re doing the right thing,” he told me, “It’s just that we should have done it earlier.”
Seven years later, Zuckerberg no longer thinks that more moderation is the right thing. In a five-minute Reelhe characterized his actions to support it as an unfortunate cave-in to the jaw of the government on Covid and other subjects. He announced a departure from content moderation – no more proactive removals and downranking of misinformation and hate speech – and the end of a fact-checking program that aims to refute the lies circulating on his platforms. Fact-checking from trusted sources will be replaced by “community notes,” a crowdsourcing approach where users provide alternative views on the veracity of posts. This technique is exactly what I was told in 2018 “it’s not enough”. While he admits now that his changes will allow “more bad things,” he says that in 2025 it’s worth it for more “free expression” to thrive.
The policy change was one of several moves that indicated that, whether or not Zuckerberg wanted to do this all along, Meta is positioning itself in sync with the new Trump administration. You’ve heard the litany, which has become a meme in itself. Meta promoted its chief lobbyist, former GOP operative Joel Kaplan, to head of global affairs; immediately appeared on Fox News (and only Fox News) to sell the new policies. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta is moving employees who write and review content from California to Texas, to “help remove concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.” He disbanded Meta’s DEI program. (Where’s Sheryl Sandberg, who was so proud of Meta’s diversity effort. Sheryl? Sheryl?) And Meta has changed some of its terms of service specifically to allow users it degrades LGBTQ people.
Now that a week has passed since Meta’s turnaround – and my first take to Zuckerberg’s speech – I am particularly haunted by one aspect: He seems to have reduced the basic practice of classical journalism, characterizing it as no better than the unreported observations of podcasters, influencers and countless random people on their platforms. This was hinted at in his Reel when he repeatedly used the term “legacy media” as a pejorative: a force that, in his opinion, urges censorship and suppresses free expression. All this time I thought the opposite!
A hint of its revised version of trust comes from the switch from fact-checkers to community notes. It’s true that the fact-checking process didn’t work well, in part because Zuckerberg didn’t defend the ladies when malicious critics accused them of bias. It is also reasonable to expect that community notes are a useful signal that a post may be misleading. But the power of refutation fails when the participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved by convincing evidence. That’s a core difference between fact-checking — which Zuckerberg has gotten rid of — and the community notes he’s implementing. The worldview of fact-checking assumes that definitive facts, arrived at through research, talking to people, and sometimes even believing in your own eyes, can be conclusive. The trick is to recognize the authorities who have earned the public’s trust by pursuing the truth. The community notes welcome alternative views, but judging which ones are reliable is all up to you. There is something to the canard that an antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if verifiable facts cannot successfully refute easily disproved flapdoodle, we are stuck in a suicidal quicksand of Babel.
That’s the world that Donald Trump, Zuckerberg’s new role model, has consciously come to realize. 60 minutes reporter Leslie Stahl he once asked Trump because he insulted journalists who were just doing their jobs. “Do you know why I do it?” he answered. “I do it to discredit you all and bring you all down, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.” In 2021, Trump more revealed their intention to profit from an attack on the truth. “If you say enough and keep saying it, they start to believe in you,” he said during a rally. A corollary to this is that if social media promotes enough falsehoods, people will believe those too. Especially if previously recognized authorities are discredited and degraded.
