This week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company Meta would be significantly reformulating its approach to content moderation, significantly broadening allowable speech and stepping entirely away from the fact-checking efforts it had begun to undertake in recent years in what Zuckerberg characterized as an attempt to cut down on “bias” and “censorship.”
This might seem a little far afield of our usual fare of City Hall and state elections and whatnot, but the reality is that Meta, through its moderation, prioritization, and underlying structural decisions on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is for good or ill a locus of civic life. The decisions made by these platforms and their head honcho aren’t just about feeds; they shape movements, elections, and public understanding.
We as humans like to think of ourselves as each an independent arbiter of our information space, intaking all of the bits of data and context and distilling them down into a sober understanding of the truth; this is partly true, but if we weren’t easily influenceable, then marketing and political campaigns wouldn’t be multi-billion-dollar industries. Whether and how we see any given information is key, and platforms like Meta are the genesis, the choke point that determines that.
This move, I think can be understood in a couple of ways. From a pretty macro level, it’s one of the final nails in the coffin for a vision of public information and accountability that gained a lot of steam in the run-up to Trump’s election, in which institutions decided that the spreading avalanche of disinformation could and should be combated head-on by concrete efforts to study and counter it.
This took the form of a renaissance in fact-checking as a practice, as standalone organizations or fact-checking units in larger entities skyrocketed. Academic disinformation centers and programs proliferated, and there was the sense for a while that we’d end up with a robust sector of media, academia, nonprofits and other civil society groups dedicated to the study of networked disinformation as well as the specific debunking of big public falsehoods in a way that would neutralize them or at least impede their runaway spread. As part of that, platforms like Meta pledged to do more to examine their role in spreading this corrosive filth.
That ended up being short-lived. Pretty quickly, an increasingly MAGA-fied Republican party and its holds on the levers of power, including Congress and the courts, began chipping away at these structures. As The Washington Post reported, institutions from Stanford University to the National Institutes of Health began scaling back disinformation efforts under legal threats and inquiries from House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan, a committed Trump lackey. At the same time, the fact-checking movement as a whole seemed to hit a wall and begin stalling as a result of both waning interest from funders and parent organizations and the grim reality that it didn’t quite seem to be working — the public was simply too steeped in their own information bubbles to respond to countervailing facts (a problem I got into in more detail in my recent Trump election post-mortem).
So this move by Meta is to some extent, one of the most serious manifestations of the broader failure of this approach, though a failure that is circular; platforms like Meta have set up the information space to be driven by engagement at all costs, which is fuel and incentive for disinformation. Efforts to parry its spread end up running against the platforms’ own underlying structures. Not to mention the irony of a reactionary push against fact-checking and disinformation studies at the same time as Elon Musk has busied himself contorting the once-gold-standard platform for political discussion into his personal right-wing playground.
On that note, beyond that 10,000-foot perspective about Zuckerberg’s announcement, there are some alarming particularities to the policy shifts. A number of observers pointed out that the company’s revised hate speech policy includes a prohibition on insults directed at someone’s mental health or possible mental illness, except for a specific carveout for LGBT+ people. Per the company, “we 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.’”
To state the obvious, this is not an apolitical choice but a starkly political one. While Zuckerberg and his company present this as a kind of hands-off approach — some cultures take this view and we have to respect that, they seem to suggest — specifically allowing the extremely charged and historically ominous contention that LGBT+ identity is some sort of mental illness is a selection of a particular ideological worldview, one that is inarguably right-wing. I believe you can discuss in good faith the appropriate scope and timing of medical interventions for certain transgender youth, for example, but it’s been some time since the idea of calling a gay or trans person literally sick in the head was considered acceptable discourse, and the conflation of that with “free speech” is a political guidepost.
Meta also scrapped prohibitions on all manner of other speech, including targeted speech based on race, ethnicity, and other factors. That Zuckerberg also pledged to move the company’s remaining trust and safety team from California to Texas — “where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams” — kind of gives away the game. This is about signaling they’re team players with the incoming administration and its penchant for post-reality, not eliminating bias. The cold, hard truth is that if a particular political and social movement dedicates itself to spinning falsehoods for its own ends, it will end up being fact-checked more seriously and more often; that’s not bias, it’s reality.
In practice, these changes mean that the conversation on these platforms will become coarser, more likely to drive out liberal voices, more saturated with lies about politics and health and less able to transmit an accurate vision of the world to users. All in all, it’s just the latest iteration of right-wing interests successfully working the refs, the same as they did with years of crowing about a supposedly liberal media establishment. Now that Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times are falling over themselves to contort coverage to be friendlier to Trump and his movement, the concerns over media independence have vanished. It was never about that: it was about winning, and I fear that our political and civic life will continue to decay for it.
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