There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t consider traditional media the enemy. He even allowed me, a traditional card-carrying journalist, to enter his house. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear their plans to do the right thing. It was part of my years of insertion into Facebook to write a book. Over the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company had been heavily criticized for failing to control misinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder had a plan to address this.
Part of the solution, he told me, was greater content moderation. It was going to hire a lot more humans to vet 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 tools to say whatever they want and then just let our community point them out and try to respond after the fact,” he told me as we sat in his sunroom. “We need to get more involved and take a more active role.” He admitted that he had been slow to realize how harmful toxic content on Facebook was, but was now committed to fixing the problem, even though it could take years. “I think we’re doing the right thing,” he told me, “we just should have done it sooner.”
Seven years later, Zuckerberg no longer believes that greater moderation is the right thing to do. In a five minute reelcharacterized their actions to support him as a regrettable caving in to government criticism over Covid and other issues. It announced a move away from content moderation (no more proactive removals and demotions of misinformation and hate speech) and the end of a fact-checking program that aimed to refute lies circulating on its platforms. Fact checks by trusted sources would be replaced by “community notes,” a crowdsourcing approach where users provide alternative views on the veracity of posts. That technique is exactly what he told me in 2018 was “not enough.” While he admits that his changes now will allow “more bad things,” he says that in 2025 it will be worth it for greater “freedom of speech” to flourish.
The policy change was one of several moves that indicated that, regardless of whether Zuckerberg wanted to do this in the first place, 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 his top lobbyist, former Republican operative Joel Kaplan, to director of global affairs; He immediately appeared on Fox News (and only Fox News) to promote the new policies. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta would move employees who write and review content from California to Texas, to “help eliminate concerns that biased employees are over-censoring content.” Dissolved Meta’s DEI program. (Where is Sheryl Sandberg, who was so proud of Meta’s diversity effort. Sheryl? Sheryl?) And Meta changed some of its terms of service specifically to allow users to demean LGBTQ people.
Now that it’s been a week since the Meta change (and my first shot of Zuckerberg’s speech), I’m particularly haunted by one aspect: he seems to have downgraded the basic practice of classical journalism, characterizing it as no better than the uninformed observations of the 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 view, encourages censorship and stifles free expression. All this time I thought otherwise!
An indication of its revised version of trustworthiness comes from the move from fact-checkers to community notes. It’s true that the fact-checking process wasn’t working well, in part because Zuckerberg didn’t defend the fact-checkers when ill-intentioned critics accused them of bias. It is also reasonable to expect that community notes are a useful signal that a post might be fallacious. But the power of refutation fails when participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved by convincing evidence. That’s a fundamental difference between fact-checking (which Zuckerberg got rid of) and the community notes he’s implementing. The fact-checking worldview assumes that definitive facts, arrived at through research, talking to people, and sometimes even believing what you see with your own eyes, can be conclusive. The trick is to recognize authorities who have earned the public’s trust by seeking the truth. Community notes welcome alternative opinions, but judging which ones are reliable is up to you. There is something to the rumor that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if verifiable facts cannot successfully refute the easily refuted flapdoodle, we are stuck in the suicidal quicksand of Babel.
That’s the world that Donald Trump, Zuckerberg’s new role model, has consciously set out to make a reality. 60 minutes journalist Leslie Stahl he once asked trump why he insulted journalists who were simply doing their job. “Do you know why I do it?” he responded. “I do it to discredit all of them and demean all of them so that when they write negative stories about me, no one believes them.” In 2021, Trump more revealed his intention to benefit from an attack on the truth. “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they will start to believe you,” he said during a rally. A corollary of this is that if social media promotes enough falsehoods, people will believe them too. Especially if previously recognized authorities are discredited and demeaned.