There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t consider the mainstream media an enemy. He even allowed me, a card-carrying legacy media person, into his home. In April 2018, I came there to hear the plan to do the right thing. It’s part of a year-long showing to Facebook to write a book. Over the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company has been criticized for failing to curb disinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder has a plan to solve this problem. Part of the solution, he says, is more content moderation. They will hire more people to review their posts, even though Facebook’s fees are considerable. They will also strive to use artificial intelligence to proactively remove harmful content. “It’s not enough to give people the tools to say what they want and then alert the community and try to respond after the fact,” he said while sitting in his sunroom. “We need to come in more and just take a more active role.” He admits he’s been slow to figure out how to crack down on toxic content on Facebook, but now he’s committed to fixing the problem, even if it may take years. “I think we’re doing the right thing,” he told me, “It’s just that we should have done it sooner.” Seven years later, Zuckerberg doesn’t think moderation is the right thing to do. In the five-minute Reel, he characterized the action in support as a cave of regret for the government’s jawboning on Covid and other subjects. He announced a shift away from content moderation—no more proactive takedowns and a crackdown on misinformation and hate speech—and the end of a fact-checking program aimed at disproving falsehoods that spread on the platform. Fact-checking by trusted sources will be replaced by “community notes,” a crowdsourcing approach in which users provide alternative views on the veracity of posts. The technique is the exact thing that I say in 2018 “not enough.” While he admits now the change will allow “worse,” he says that in 2025, it would be better if “free expression” goes further. doing this all together, Meta has positioned itself in sync with the new Trump administration. You’ve heard the litany, which has become its own meme. Meta promoted top lobbyist, former GOP operative Joel Kaplan, to chief global affairs officer; he immediately appeared on Fox News (and only Fox News) to Tout his new policy. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta will move employees who write and review content from California to Texas, to “help remove concerns that employees are too biased to censor content.” He disbanded the DEI Meta program. (Where’s Sheryl Sandberg, who is so proud of Meta’s diversity efforts. Sheryl? Sheryl?) And Meta changed some terms of service specifically to allow users to bash LGBTQ people. Now it’s been a week since Meta’s turnaround-and the first take on Zuckerberg’s speech-I’m particularly haunted by one aspect: He seems to have downranked the basic practice of classic journalism, characterizing it no better than the nonreported observations of podcasters, influencers, and countless random people on the platform. This is revealed in Reel when he repeatedly uses the term “legacy media” as a pejorative: a force that, in his view, encourages censorship and stifles free expression. All this time I thought the opposite! A hint of a revised version of trustworthiness comes from the shift from fact-checkers to public records. Indeed, the fact-checking process doesn’t work very well — in part because Zuckerberg doesn’t defend fact-checkers when ill-intentioned critics allege bias. It’s also reasonable to expect community notes to be a useful signal that a post might be wrong. But the power of refutation fails when the participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved by convincing evidence. This is the core difference between fact-checking—which Zuckerberg has done away with—and the community records he does. A fact-checking worldview assumes that definitive facts, arrived at through research, talking to people, and sometimes believing your own eyes, can be conclusive. The trick is to identify authorities who have earned public trust by pursuing the truth. Community notes welcome alternative views—but deciding which to believe is up to you. There is a canard that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if the verifiable facts can not successfully refute the flapdoodle easily disproven, we are stuck in the suicidal quicksand of babel. It is the world that Donald Trump, Zuckerberg’s new role model, has consciously set to realize. 60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl once asked Trump why he insulted a reporter who was just doing his job. “You know why I did it?” the answer. “I did this to hurt you all and humiliate you all, so if you write a negative story about me, no one will believe you.” In 2021, Trump further announced his intention to benefit from the attack on the truth. “If you talk enough and keep talking, they will believe you,” he said during the rally. A corollary to that if social media promotes enough falsehoods, people will believe it too. Especially when previously recognized authorities are discredited and discredited.
