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John,
This is how fascism starts.
State takeover of the media starts with voluntary self-censorship. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is falling all over himself with his Trump-directed apologies for ever thinking Facebook should be responsible for preventing itself from becoming an X-like cesspool of lies and disinformation.
Announcing the end of fact-checking on his platforms, Zuckerberg says he thinks it will “take another ten years” of fact-free operation before Meta is “back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn’t messed that up in the first place.”
Zuckerberg cites the “cultural tipping point” of Trump’s election as the deciding factor in choosing to dismantle Meta’s entire fact-checking apparatus, by which he means, his need to align with power rather than speak truth to it.
Needless to say, Trump is plenty pleased with Zuckerberg’s kow-towing, which comes on the heels of the Meta CEO’s recent ring-kissing trip to Mar-A-Lago. The president-elect praised the move, saying “I think they’ve come a long way.” Could his threats to put Zuckerberg in prison have caused the change in policy, a reporter asked. “Probably,” said the dictator-to-be.
Fascism starts with just this kind of full-blown appeasement. Meta must protect its users from malicious content, not censor their own fact-checking to curry favor with Trump and give in to his autocratic bullying.
Send a direct message to Mark Zuckerberg and tell Facebook, Instagram and Threads: The truth is not based on public opinion. Reinstate fact-checking now!
Not only will Zuckerberg release most of the 40,000 fact checkers based in hundreds of small organizations he has hired to check on the accuracy of his platforms’ posts, but he also announced he will be moving what little remains of his “trust and safety” workers from California to Texas, “where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”
So Texas workers will be less “biased” than California workers? As Dan Evon of the nonprofit News Literacy Project notes, the move “provides an air of legitimacy to a popular disinformation narrative: that fact-checking is politically biased.”
Yet the political bias of Zuckerberg’s announcement is impossible to miss. Not only will these changes allow, in his words, more “bad stuff” to circulate on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, but Meta will be retooling its AI systems, eliminating the demotion of problematic content such as posts that describe homosexuality as a mental illness.
Facebook has already been taking steps in this direction, such as allowing candidates in the 2024 election to claim without evidence that the 2020 election was “stolen” and scaling back its Voter Information Center, replacing continuous updates about the election from groups like the Bipartisan Policy Center with static links to government websites.
No doubt Zuckerberg also has his eyes on thwarting the FTC’s lawsuit to break up Meta. Trump’s pick to replace Lina Khan as FTC Chair, Andrew Ferguson, has already signaled he plans to target not the biggest conglomerates, but rather those companies that “facilitate or promote censorship.”
Instead of fact-checking, Meta will follow the lead of Musk’s X by providing user-generated “Community Notes.” Not only will these posts be drowned out among other user content, but, in order to be posted, they will require agreement among ideologically divergent users. In other words, these notes will need to be MAGA-friendly to even show up on the site.
Send a message to Mark Zuckerberg: The truth is not always MAGA-aligned. Meta has a public responsibility to prevent massive misinformation. Reinstate fact-checking now!
Thank you for standing up for the fact-based alternative to “alternative facts”!
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action
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