A new era
of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for
truth on social media
Chris
Stokel-Walker
The Meta
boss’s decision to end Facebook and Instagram’s factchecking program has set
the stage for a fact-free four years online
Tue 7 Jan
2025 20.38 GMT
Social media
has always acted as something of a funhouse mirror to society as a whole. The
algorithms and amplifications of an always-online existence have helped
accentuate the worst parts of our lives, while tucking in and hiding the best.
It’s part of why we’re so polarised today, with two tribes shouting past one
another on social media into a gaping chasm of hopelessness.
Which is
what makes a declaration by one titan of big tech this week so worrying.
Abandon hope all ye who enter: less than two weeks before Donald Trump returns
to the White House for a second crack at the US presidency, Meta, the parent
company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads, has made major changes to
content moderation, and in doing so appears to align itself with the views of
the incoming president.
In a bizarre
video message posted to his personal Facebook page on Tuesday, Meta’s CEO, Mark
Zuckerberg, announced the platform is getting rid of its factcheckers. In their
place? Mob rule.
Zuckerberg
has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide
logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community
notes format for policing what is and isn’t acceptable speech on its platforms.
Starting in the US, the company will be dramatically shifting the Overton
window towards whoever can shout the loudest.
The Meta CEO
all but admitted that the move was politically motivated. “It’s time to get
back to our roots around free expression,” he said, confessing that
“restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with
mainstream discourse”. He admitted to past “censorship mistakes” – here,
probably meaning the past four years of tamping down political speech while a
Democratic president was in office – and said he would “work with President
Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies
to censor more”.
The most
dog-whistle comment was a throwaway remark that Meta would be moving what
remained of its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of liberal
California and its US content moderation would now be based in staunchly
Republican Texas. All that was missing from the video was Zuckerberg wearing a
Maga hat and toting a shotgun.
To be clear:
all businesspeople make shrewd moves to accommodate the political weather. And
there are few more violent storms than Hurricane Trump approaching the US. But
few people’s decisions matter more than Mark Zuckerberg’s.
The Meta CEO
has found himself, in the past 21 years, a central part of our society.
Initially, he oversaw a website that was used by college students. Now it’s
used by billions of us from all walks of life. What in the early 2000s was a
quaint online pursuit for fun has become the “de facto public town square”, to
borrow Elon Musk’s words. Where Meta goes, the world – online and offline –
follows. And Meta has just decided to take a drastic, dramatic handbrake turn
to the right.
Don’t
believe me. Believe the watchdogs. “Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from
any sane and safe approach to content moderation,” said the Real Facebook
Oversight Board, an independent, self-appointed arbiter of Meta’s moves, in a
statement.
Why they say
that is because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from being so polarised over
the past decade or more by social media, it’s that those who are the angriest
win arguments. Outrage and lies can spread on social media, and have only been
kept partly in check by platforms’ ability to intervene when things get out of
hand. (Remember just four years ago, Meta suspended Donald Trump from Facebook
and Instagram for two years for inciting the violence that racked the Capitol
on 6 January 2021.)
Social
networks have always struggled to moderate speech on their platforms. The one
thing they’re certain of doing, whichever way they’ve come down on an argument,
is annoying 50% of the population. Those platforms haven’t helped themselves
with chronic underinvestment in favour of growing their business at all costs.
The platforms have long said effective moderation is an unsolvable issue of
scale, but it’s a problem they created with an untrammelled pursuit of scale at
all costs.
Certainly,
policing online discourse is difficult, and certainly, content moderation at
the level companies such as Meta have been trying to operate has not worked.
But forswearing it entirely in favour of community notes is not the answer.
Suggesting that it is a rational, evidence-based decision hides the reality:
this is a politically expedient move for a man who this week saw the departure
of a self-described “radical” centrist, Nick Clegg, as his global policy chief
in favour of a Republican-leaning one. And who also appointed Dana White, the
Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO and close Trump ally, to Meta’s board.
In many
ways, you can’t blame Zuckerberg for bending the knee to Donald Trump. The
problem is his decision has huge ramifications.
This is an
extinction-level event for the idea of objective truth on social media – an
organism that was already on life support, but was clinging on in part because
Meta was willing to fund independent factchecking organisations in order to try
to maintain some element of truthfulness, free from political bias. Night is
day. Up is down. Meta is X. Mark Zuckerberg is Elon Musk. Buckle in for a
turbulent, vitriolic and fact-free four years online.
Chris
Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s
Favourite App
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