Mark Zuckerberg’s gaslighting can’t hide the truth for Donald Trump

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company’s shameful decision to end fact-checking on its Facebook and Instagram platforms last Tuesday, he defended his decision in a five-minute video, claiming that it represented a return to the company’s “founding values.” In truth, Meta’s bottom line and Zuckerberg’s well-known tendency to accommodate himself to the prevailing political winds are the only values his decision serves. Early in his speech, Zuckerberg revealed his preferred side when he made the entirely false but very Trumpian claim that “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” He added the complaint that “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.” He said that Meta tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.” But, as Zuckerberg put it, “The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US.” And if that weren’t enough to signal Zuckerberg’s obeisance to MAGA world, he also announced that Meta would be “relocating trust and safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas.” The move, Zuckerberg assured his listeners, “will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content… I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Yes, that’s Texas, which is not generally known as a bastion of freedom or the place where bias goes to die. The Facebook and Instagram changes include “simplifying” content policies by removing certain restrictions on topics like immigration and gender,” and “Changing enforcement approach for policy violations…to focus… only on illegal and high-severity violations.” “The community asked to see less politics…, but it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.” According to materials obtained by The Intercept, the content users will now be free to post on Facebook and Instagram, includes “derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, That is one reason why the new era Zuckerberg is promising feels like an older era when freedom meant the absence of regulation and a “let the buyer beware” approach in economics and politics. Thomas gets it right when he says, “Technology has created a sort of bastardized marketplace of ideas on social media sites…, any and everything as if all information has the same value or credibility.” In that world, Thomas argues, people only trust “their” evidence and “languish in a perversely post-modern Frankenstein world of no facts matter—unless they are mine.” In this new world, Thomas says, “Posting it makes it so.” And once posted, as the 18th-century theologian Thomas Francklin warned, “Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn, and she has neither vigour nor activity enough to pursue and overtake her enemy…” Because of that, fact-checking is more important than it has ever been.