Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a video this week announcing that all of his company’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc.) will do away with their fact-checking programs. Although the tech CEO framed his new policies as a defense of free speech against excessive censorship, his talking points regarding government interference, “legacy media,” and what he called a “new era” under President-elect Donald Trump revealed a deeper ploy. It’s one that envisions less regulation for multi-billion-dollar tech companies like his and less government restraint on expanding his influence—and wealth—around the globe. In other words, Facebook still doesn’t care about you and is once again choosing profits over people.
The decision to eliminate fact-checking protocols has raised eyebrows and sparked debate among users, policymakers, and media experts alike. This move aligns Zuckerberg with a broader trend among tech CEOs who are increasingly embracing a laissez-faire approach to content moderation, often at the expense of factual accuracy and public safety. Yet, running a platform that can be detrimental to its users is not a new trend when it comes to the Meta founder.
In 2018, whistleblower Christopher Wylie exposed how the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected millions of Facebook users’ personal data without their consent. This company harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook user profiles and went on to profile voters for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign based on their Facebook activity.
Fast forward to 2021, when data scientist Frances Haugen came forward as another Facebook whistleblower. She shared a wide array of internal documents and gave several interviews showing that whenever there was a conflict between the interests of the company and the public good, the social media giant would choose its own interests.
In a Senate hearing, Haugen testified: “The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the U.S. government, and from governments around the world. The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages.”
While Meta’s fact-checking program has been in place since December 2016, a number of studies in the years since have shown that Facebook, as one of the largest social media platforms, has been a hotbed of misinformation regarding a number of topics, including vaccines, COVID-19, and medical science overall. According to some, this doesn’t seem to be simply based on the ineptitude of the program but engineered by design.
Not about censorship
Meta partnered with a number of third-party organizations to carry out their fact-checking. According to the company’s website, their fact-checking partners went through a rigorous certification process with the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). The IFCN is a subsidiary of the journalism research organization Poynter Institute. Yet, in his recent video, Zuckerberg framed the fact-checkers as being “too politically biased” and said that they had “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Pushing back against this narrative, Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, released a statement explaining just how the fact-checking program worked. He noted that the decision to remove posts deemed as misinformation always rested in Meta’s hands as the final decision maker. Brown stated:
“Facebook created this program with the good intentions of accepting some accountability for the fact that misinformation, some of it horribly harmful, spread with incredible speed on its powerful platform. It [Meta] set the rules—including an eventual prohibition of checking politicians. Fact-checkers offered independent reviews of the posts—using Meta tools and rules, we showed our sources. Then it was up to Meta to decide what to do.”
Brown went on to call Zuckerberg’s blame of fact-checkers a disappointing “cop-out” and that Meta “always held the cards.” “Facts are not censorship,” Brown noted, “It’s time to quit invoking inflammatory and false language in describing the role of journalists and fact-checking.”
Yet, if Meta’s own website and Brown are to be believed, why then did Zuckerberg, in his video, lead with the idea that the independent fact-checkers his company partnered with were politically biased and pushing heavy censorship?
It would seem that the tech CEO felt the need to paint a villain in order to exalt a “hero” in himself and the incoming Trump White House administration. One need only look through his less than ten-minute speech to conclude as much.
The devil in the details
Zuckerberg is part of a long list of Silicon Valley CEOs who have donated one million dollars or more to Trump’s inauguration fund. This list includes Apple, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. These donations followed after face-to-face meetings of these CEOs with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Zuckerberg was one of the first to arrive in late November 2024 to speak with the president-elect. It should be noted that among these companies, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Google parent Alphabet are all facing antitrust lawsuits from the federal government.
This alignment with Trump and his MAGA movement can be interpreted as a strategic maneuver to solidify Silicon Valley’s influence and power within the global marketplace. By catering to the political rhetoric that often prioritizes populist sentiments over factual information, these tech leaders appear to be fortifying their positions against regulatory pressures from U.S. officials.
And we know just how much Trump and MAGA dislike fact-checkers.
Zuckerberg has promoted longtime Republican political operative Joel Kaplan—who served eight years in the George W. Bush administration—from vice president of global public policy to the president of global affairs for Meta Platforms. Kaplan has been with the company since 2011. In a perhaps even more controversial move, Zuckerberg appointed Trump ally Dana White, president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship(UFC), to his board of directors.
White has come under fire for a number of controversies in recent years regarding defending the homophobic rants of some of his UFC fighters and his own remarks against members of the LGBTQ community. White has been known to defend his and his fighters’ sentiments under the guise of free speech.
It seems fitting then that in his video, Zuckerberg made assertions such as that Meta will “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” And that the movement for inclusivity resulted in the shutting down of “opinions” and “people with different ideas.”
It appears that the so-called mainstream discourse he wants to appeal to aligns with White and other right-wing conservatives who have supported an onslaught of legislative restrictions on members of the LGBTQ community, including those who question the rights of women to their own bodies and rebuke the normalizing of non-heteronormative sexuality.
One need only look at Meta’s newly rolled out “Hateful Conduct” policy following Zuckerberg’s video. In the document, “hate speech” has been replaced with “hateful conduct.” In its revised policy, Meta noted that they do allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
An example of how this may play out is that now, if someone on Facebook wants to make a case that it is their belief that members of the LGBTQ community have a mental illness due to their sexual orientation, then they may do so.
Meta also noted that they will “allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military law enforcement and teaching jobs” And that they will “also allow the same content based on sexual orientation when the content is based on religious beliefs.” This means that if someone argues that it is their religious belief that someone should be excluded from work or basic human rights due to their sexuality or gender, then they may post as such without fear of “censorship.”
Among these revisions, the company also removed the line stating that hate speech “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence.” This could be argued as a means of pushing back against the notion that online discourse contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Zuckerberg also noted that they are moving their trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California to Texas. This, too, plays into the liberal (California) vs. conservative (Texas) narrative. By reducing restrictions and jumping head first into the ever-present “culture wars” that the conservative right-wing engages in, Zuckerberg seems to be hoping to tap into the support of the MAGA base and, in turn, the incoming Trump administration. And the glaring reason for this alignment seems to the drive to secure global monopoly and win protection from government regulation.
Global tech monopoly
While Zuckerberg led with the idea of freedom of speech for individual users, perhaps he hoped that Americans’ dwindling attention span—ironically attributed to social media—would make it so many would not watch until the end of his video. For this is where he says the quiet part out loud.
“Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” he said.
It would seem that the real censorship that Zuckerberg wants to do away with is the “censorship” of his company’s ability to monopolize industries and make as much money as he wants.
He places the blame for this censorship on the U.S. government. He asserts that calls for regulation of tech companies and social media platforms by members of the U.S. government have “emboldened other governments to go even further.” Citing alleged regulation hurdles in Europe, Latin America, and China, Zuckerberg claims that “we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I’m excited to take it.”
But whose free expression is he speaking to? His rhetoric makes it sound like he’s doing some sort of patriotic duty of spreading American ideals across the globe. Yet, if the growing calls for more regulation of the tech industry in the U.S. are to be accounted for, it would seem as though many Americans are waking up to the idea that these multi-million dollar tech companies need “censorship.”
While Zuckerberg may frame this move as a victory for free speech, it ultimately raises critical questions about the ethics of content moderation and the responsibilities of technology companies in safeguarding public discourse. As the landscape of social media continues to evolve, the implications of these choices will resonate far beyond the digital realm, impacting the integrity of information itself. One could argue that if this responsibility is left in the hands of those only interested in the financial bottom line, it will be detrimental to the future of our country and, if we are to go by Zuckerberg’s video, the world.
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