Meta’s decision to remove its fact-checking feature following the rise of Republican control of the White House is a last-ditch effort to gain legislative leverage from Trump despite the flood of non-flagged misinformation that will soon infiltrate American citizens’ social media timelines.
On Jan. 7, Meta — the parent company of social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads — announced via their website that they would be removing the third-party fact-checking program with independent American journalists from their platforms in the U.S.
In a news release titled “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said now is the time to “get back to [Meta’s] roots around free expression” on their social media platforms.
This pledge entails replacing fact-checkers with a less “politically biased” moderation model derived from X called Community Notes, wherein communities are given the jurisdiction “to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context” paired with a “much less obtrusive” indication when that may be the case.
He also plans to rid content policies of restrictions on “topics like immigration and gender” that garner “out of touch” opinions; change policy enforcement to avoid the acts of “censorship” that Zuckerberg associates with fact-checkers; push political content; and move content moderation teams out of California and into Texas where there will be “less concern about the bias of [Meta’s] teams.”
Despite Zuckerberg’s implications that online misinformation is a trivial issue, researchers at New York University found that political extremists are far more likely to interact with and believe online misinformation. Furthermore, they found that visibly flagging a social media post spreading misinformation reduces the overall amount of misinformation appearing on the feeds of more extreme users.
Therefore, it’s easy to deduce that Meta’s U.S. platforms will see an increase in misinformation in the coming months.
Keeping in mind that increased access to misinformation fuels widespread political radicalization and the identification with ideologies based in fearmongering and deception, it is evident that Zuckerberg has willingly ignored the truth because shifting to an outward belief in right-wing ideologies will serve him with monetary and power-related benefits now that America’s government is mainly controlled by Republicans.
Do not be deceived by Zuckerberg’s supposed efforts to cultivate “friendly and positive” online spaces wherein “free expression” is restored. Zuckerberg’s actions are clearly partisan: mirroring the actions of the Republican-affiliated Elon Musk, fueling right-wing claims of “censorship” when confronted with plainly false political facts online, and moving Meta’s moderation teams from a blue state to a red one shows an undeniable shift toward the right.
Zuckerberg’s promise to prioritize political content poses another threat. As Zuckerberg is now privy to right-wing politics, Meta’s algorithms will no doubt begin to push right-wing media on their American platforms.
This has been suspected to have already occurred on Musk’s X, as evidenced within Vanity Fair’s coverage of analyses from both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post finding that the platform favours the exposure of right-leaning media in comparison to the left.
Zuckerberg’s decision will have insurmountable consequences for American democracy. Seeing as over half of Americans use social media to get news, with Facebook being the chief social media platform most likely to be relied upon for news, Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs have a degree of responsibility of protecting their users from damaging political misinformation.
Zuckerberg views this responsibility as engaging in censorship. He has discredited legacy media that have asked him to approach fact-checking with great care during Trump’s first presidential campaign, saying in his news release video that Meta was increasingly “pushed to censor more and more” political topics during this time.
He went as far as subtly suggesting in his speech that it is the left who are making social media platforms more partisan, saying in his news release video that the U.S. government pushed censorship onto Meta “over the past four years,” implying that the Democratic Biden-Harris administration was to blame.
The fundamental idea of a healthy democracy is virtually impossible when voters can easily become susceptible to lies surrounding a politician’s policy plans or online persona.
Zuckerberg suddenly expressing concern for “censored” victims of the war on political misinformation just as Republican politicians rise into power is completely ingenuine. Fueling the belief that fact-checking is a partisan issue when the president you are trying to gain approval of is all too acquainted with making misleading or downright false claims is a spineless act on Zuckerberg’s part.
It is completely ridiculous that fact-checking political information has become coded as censorship of “free expression” by the owners of major social media platforms.
Expression can never be “free” if it is being influenced by lies and misinformation about reality, political or not.