Why Zuckerberg has stopped fact-checking while he is increasingly cozy with Trump

Mark Zuckerberg, who often bends with the political wind, steps away from fact checking.

And this is part of a broader effort by Meta’s CEO to curry favor Donald Trump after a long and difficult relationship.

After an earlier outcry, Zuck made a big show of declaring that Facebook would hire fact-checkers to combat misinformation on the globally popular site. That was a clear sign that Facebook started to become more and more a journalistic organization rather than a passive poster of users’ opinions (and dog photos).

But it didn’t work. In fact, it led to more information suppression and censorship. Why would anyone believe that a bunch of unknown fact-checkers work for one of the increasingly unpopular tech titans?

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Side by side with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and newly elected President Donald Trump. (Getty Images)

Now Zuckerberg is pulling the plug and announcing his decision in a video to underline its major nature:

“The problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1 percent of messages. That’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward reprioritizing speech.”

Let me jump in here. With that line about the “cultural tipping point,” Zuckerberg flatly admits that he is following the conventional wisdom – and the biggest tipping point, of course, is Trump’s election to a second term. And skeptics are portraying this as a bow to the president-elect and his team.

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“So we’re going back to our roots and focusing on reducing errors, simplifying our policies and restoring free speech on our platforms…

“We’re going to abolish fact checkers” and replace them with community notes, which are already used on X. “After Trump was first elected in 2016, the traditional media wrote non-stop about how disinformation was a threat to democracy.

“We have attempted in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of the truth. But the fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created. especially in the US”

SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk speaks at a town hall with Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick at the Roxain Theater on October 20, 2024 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

It was Zuckerberg, along with Twitter’s previous management, who banned Trump after the Capitol riot. This led to many Trumpian attacks on Facebook, and the president-elect told me he had reversed his position on banning TikTok because it would help Facebook, which he saw as the bigger danger.

Trump said last summer that Zuckerberg plotted against him in 2020 and that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again.

The president-elect summed it up in a message: “ZUCKERBUCKS, DON’T DO IT!”

Here’s some more from Z: “We’re going to simplify our content policies and remove a lot of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive is increasingly being used to express opinions and excluding people with different ideas. And it has gone too far.”

That is indeed true. And I agree with that. In 2020, social media, led by Twitter, suppressed the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, dismissing it as Russian disinformation, though a year and a half later the establishment press suddenly declared, “Hey, the laptop report was right .

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Let’s face it: people like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (now engaged in a war of words with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over an alleged cover-up of gang rapes of young girls when Starmer was chief prosecutor) have enormous influence. They are the new gatekeepers. As so-called traditional media become less relevant – as we see with the mass exodus of top talent from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and the recent rise of podcasts – they control much of the public dialogue. And yes, they are private companies that can do whatever they want.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer listens to British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’ speech at the Labor Party conference in Liverpool, England, Monday, September 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

At yesterday’s marathon news conference, a reporter asked Trump about Zuckerberg: “Do you think he’s responding directly to the threats you’ve made to him in the past with promises?”

‘Probably. Yeah, probably,” Trump said, twisting the knife slightly.

In the meantime, after making the obligatory trek to Mar-a-Lago for dinner, the CEO has taken a number of steps to join forces with the new administration. And it doesn’t hurt that Meta is donating a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration.

Zuck appointed prominent Republican lawyer Joel Kaplan as head of global affairs, replacing a former British deputy prime minister. On “Fox & Friends” yesterday, Kaplan said:

“We now have a real opportunity. There will be a new administration and a new president who are great defenders of free speech, and that makes a difference. One of the things we’ve seen is that when you have an American president, an administration pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don’t even have the protection of the First Amendment to really put pressure on to practice on American companies that we will be working with. President Trump needs to reduce these kinds of things from happening all over the world.”

We’re going to work with President Trump. Do you have it?

In addition, Zuckerberg is adding Dana White, CEO of United Fighting Championship, to the Meta board. White has long been a Trump ally, so MAGA now has a voice within the company.

In other words: get started with the program.

Footnote: At his news conference, where Trump appeared angry about the latest lawsuits and plans to convict him, the new president said — or “did not rule out,” in journalistic parlance — “military coercion” against two of his latest targets.

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“Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes,” he said. And Americans lost many lives building the Panama Canal. “You may have to do something.”

He will not use military force against either of them. But his answer gets the pot moving, as he knew it would.