Mark Zuckerberg Capitulates
In a big reversal, the world's largest social media company, Meta, will open its platforms up to more divisive content and disinformation.
On January 7th the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, announced he was making some big changes to how Meta’s social media platforms—Facebook and Instagram specifically—would be moderated going forward. The announcement came about 6 weeks after Zuckerberg was summoned invited to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of talk with Donald Trump, who assumes the presidency on January 20th. It appears Trump got an oath of loyalty agreement to cooperate from the CEO of the world’s largest social media company.
I’ll summarize and comment on the changes Zuckerberg announced on January 7th:
He’s firing Meta’s independent fact-checking team all together. Zuckerberg claims Meta’s own independent fact-checkers have been “too politically bias.” Certainly people can be biased in how they interpret facts, but that’s why fact-checkers have a process to follow and must cite valid sources for their decision. We can actually check their work and validate their decision. Some of Meta’s fired fact-checkers, who are intimately familiar with how the fact-checking process works, and were probably shocked at the dagger suddenly thrust into their back, ruled Zuckerberg’s claim as False. Funny that Zuckerberg claims his fact-checkers have been too politically bias, but then doesn’t offer any proof or comprehensive independent study supporting his claim. Unlike the requirement of his former fact-checkers, Zuckerberg produced no evidence. Nothing. Apparently Zuckerberg expects us to just take his word for it. I don’t. None of us should.
Zuckerberg said Meta will reduce content restrictions on controversial topics like “immigration and gender.” Personally I don’t have an issue with this change. But it’s telling that Zuckerberg mentions these two specific topics, since these two topics were so successfully used by Trump and first buddy, Elon Musk, in helping get Trump elected last November. I guess we’re to assume Zuckerberg’s mention of these topics—favorable to Trump politically—were just a coincidence? I don’t think so.
Political content will have a higher priority, and be phased back into our news feeds. Sure, I don’t mind a little politics. But without good content moderation on Meta’s end, we all know what this ultimately means. Between the algorithm and some of our “friends” sharing their political stuff, our news feeds will slowly become more and more polluted with political jokes, military grade propaganda, blatant lies, and conspiracy theories. Facebook will start to resemble that dumpster fire known as X (formerly known, before that, as Twitter). I deleted my X account because the platform had become so toxic. If social media sites are suppose to be, metaphorically speaking, public squares for debate, X had become a rowdy coliseum of conspiracy kooks, hecklers, and cranks.
Meta’s content moderation team is being moved from California to Texas. I’m guessing Zuckerberg thinks Texans are better at moderating? Obviously the real reason for this move was straight up political. Texas is, for now, a red state and Trump believes Meta will be hiring Texans, and he’s hoping that means more republicans looking out for “conservative” interests. Maybe that will work. I don’t know. But I suspect this move isn’t likely to deliver for the Trumpster. Facebook will need to fill these jobs with tech people. And typically speaking, even in Texas, tech people are usually well educated and typically not of the conservative bent.
And lastly Zuckerberg says he’ll work with Trump to combat censorship in other countries. Really?! Trump help combat censorship? The guy who is the king of the Non-Disclosure Agreement? The guy who openly admires autocratic leaders of nations that silence the opposition with trips to the gulag or the morgue? The guy who openly intimidates people during his speeches or on social media for criticizing him…or turning state’s evidence? No, what I think Trump wants is for Zuckerberg to assist with ensuring voices like Trump’s get free rein on social media in other countries, especially in Europe I’m guessing.
My belief is these changes are driven by fear and self-interest on the part of Mark Zuckerberg. Meta suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts for 2 years, rightfully so, after the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building. At the time Trump accused Facebook (Zuckerberg) of “censorship.” But Trump had used Facebook and Instagram to spread lies about the 2020 election, which helped fuel the storming the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6th by Trump supporters.
On Trump’s own social media platform, ironically called Truth Social, he made vailed threats against Zuckerberg. Trump and other conservative right wingers have long accused Meta’s fact-checkers/moderators of removing content or banning the accounts of conservatives more often than liberals. There is some truth to this actually. Because, factually speaking, conservatives are actually more likely to share misinformation. Here are a couple key findings published in Forbes from a July 2023 report by Meta’s own researchers and academics. I added the bolding.
One of the study’s papers, which used aggregated data for 208 million U.S. Facebook users, found that most misinformation on Facebook existed within conservative echo chambers, which did not have an equivalent on the liberal side of the platform.
The paper found that news outlets on the right post a higher fraction of news stories rated false by Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, meaning conservative audiences are more exposed to unreliable news.
We also have a recently published study in the scientific journal, Nature (October 2024). In this study the 5 research scientists involved looked at 9,000 politically active twitter (now X) users leading up to the 2020 presidential election. One of the reports’ key findings states that:
Although users estimated to be pro-Trump/conservative were indeed substantially more likely to be suspended than those estimated to be pro-Biden/liberal, users who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots.
With this understanding you can put 2 & 2 together. You can understand Trump’s motivation. He wanted Meta’s fact-checker program dismantled, and that’s exactly what he got from Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is absolutely aware of the July 2023 report cited above. It was researched and published by his own company. I’m sure he’s well aware of the study published in Nature, and the various other studies done that support the same conclusion. Yes, it’s true, that Meta’s fact-checkers and content moderators were removing more content considered conservative than content considered liberal. But that’s because conservatives actually do share more false information on social media than liberals do. So naturally conservatives would see more of their content removed or accounts banned by Meta moderators. So yes, Meta was bias—toward the truth! But the truth has become the greatest causality of this time.
So we’ll be getting more political propaganda pumped into our news feeds. There won’t be any independent fact-checkers ensuring lies and disinformation aren’t being spread by American extremists groups, or Russian and Chinese military propaganda units. And what little moderation is done by Meta will be carried out by, what Trump believes, are rightward leaning Texans. Zuckerberg is pleasing Trump all he can. Who knows, maybe Zuckerberg is secretly a Trump guy. Besides pleasing Trump, this move also puts more money in Zuckerberg’s pocket. Not having a fact-checking team and reducing moderation across Meta will save him millions of dollars ultimately.
But what about the health of our democracy? Doesn’t that matter? What about civic responsibility? What happened to corporate statesmanship? How about patriotism?
With these changes Zuckerberg knows exactly what he’s doing to large segments of the population, and to the health of our democracy. The safeguards Meta had put in place up until now were in large measure done because Facebook had been implicated in putting profit over safety and civic responsibility before. Recall the powerful 60 Minutes interview of Frances Haugen, a former Meta data engineer, known as the Facebook whistle blower. Here is part of her interview in 2021:
60 Minutes: Haugen told us the root of Facebook’s problem is in a change it made in 2018 to its algorithms: the programing that decides what you see on your Facebook news feed.
Frances Haugen: You might see only 100 pieces of content if you sit and scroll on for 5 minutes. But Facebook has thousands of options to show you.
60 Minutes: The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you’ve engaged with the most in the past.
Frances Haugen: One of the consequences with how Facebook is picking out that content today is that it is optimizing for content that gets engagement or reaction. But it’s own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing [gets the most engagement]. It’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.
Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.
60 Minutes: Facebook essentially amplifies the worst of human nature.
Frances Haugen: It’s one of these unfortunate consequences. No one at Facebook is malevolent. But the incentives are misaligned. Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction, and the more anger they get exposed to the more they interact, the more they consume.
Zuckerberg knows these announced changes will be bad for our democracy. Civic trust will only erode more. With large segments of population, Meta’s changes will optimize their Facebook, Threads, and Instagram news feeds to show more content that is hateful, divisive, and polarizing. This will only deepen divisions and inspire bad actors. As Haugen said: “When we live in an information environment that is full of angry polarizing content, it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other.” These changes will harden opinions—reinforced in news feeds over and over—to the point where compromise, consensus, and unity are impossible. We will see more anger and hatred online. More and more people—friends and family members—will become radicalized to the sad point were it divides families and destroys life long friendships.
Our nation is already experiencing some of the deepest division we’ve seen since the Civil War. We’re approaching a point where a major national crisis or the downfall of our Republic has become a very real possibility. We can only hope we get through these next 4 years in one piece. I’m hopeful, but not optimistic at this point.
We’re witnessing the rise of a powerful oligarchy in this country. This is at the core of multi-layered problem for our society. In the United States so much wealth is concentrated in so few hands. And with money comes power and influence and the ability of the rich to force their will and preferences on the rest of us. Zuckerberg, who’ll be sitting on the inaugural stage when Trump gets sworn in, and holding an inaugural party for Trump afterward, is a de-facto member of the oligarchic party now. I suspect that’s what he wanted all along.
The only real check on Zuckerberg (and the billionaire class), for now, will come from us, the people. Zuckerberg knows just how hard and unlikely it is that people will delete their Meta accounts. I’ve been on Facebook for over a decade. I have so much wrapped up in it now—friends, organizations, pictures, events, reminders, etc, etc. I also use social media to spread this blog. So I don’t plan on deleting my Facebook page, but I’m damn sure going to cut back on the usage of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. Believe me I wish there was a great alternative to Facebook. I wish there was one where you could switch and import all your data over to the new platform. But that’s not the case right now.
I recommend opening accounts with other social media platforms, like Bluesky and Substack Notes. I use them daily. Both of these social media platforms are civically responsible. Both platforms are moderating content to allow civil discourse and healthy debate while denying the pollution of bad actors. These CEOs care about the health of our democracy. We need more corporate statesmanship like this. Let’s hope the future proves there are a lot more like them.