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.

It will be cheered by authoritarians everywhere and be especially welcome at MAGA headquarters in Mar-a-Lago. An aide to President-elect Trump made that clear when they proclaimed that Zuckerberg is now “speaking Trump's love language.” Not coincidentally, the new Meta policy followed quickly on the heels of Zuckerberg’s powwow with the president-elect the day before he announced the end of fact-checking.

That would be bad enough, but Zuckerberg’s announcement, clothed as it was in his entirely muddled musings about free speech, was an attempt to gaslight the public while opening the spigots for those who want to use social media to drown the modern world in a cesspool of mis- and disinformation. We need to see through his free-speech blather. 

As the great student of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt explained, freedom and democracy depend on being able to tell the difference between facts and falsehoods. Zuckerberg has made it clear that Facebook and Instagram will no longer offer help in that endeavor. In doing so, he chose sides in the ongoing political struggle to chart America’s political future.

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.

Despite his almost laughable claim about the Lonestar State, Zuckerberg conceded that his policy changes would mean “we're going to catch less bad stuff.” He made clear his willingness to pay that price in the name of “giving people a voice” and “restoring free expression.” 

That’s gaslighting 101.

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. That was great for the powerful and not so much for the rest of us.  

Without naming him, Zuckerberg promised to imitate what Elon Musk had done on X by introducing a “more comprehensive community notes system.”  The Washington Post explains that that system involves “shifting the onus of containing falsehoods on some of the world’s largest social networks to ordinary users… who will do the work without pay or training.” “On X,” the Post reports, “any user can request to join Community Notes. Once accepted, they can suggest a note on any post they argue is incorrect or needs more context. Notes that receive enough backing from contributors with ‘different perspectives’ are displayed publicly.”

Such an approach asks us to believe that in the online world, an effective “marketplace of ideas” ensures that good ideas will drive out bad ones and that truth triumphs over falsehood. The metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas” is routinely trotted out by people like Zuckerberg to defend abdicating responsibility for doing what they can to ensure that freedom and democracy thrive.

We know neither works well if speakers with millions of online followers spew false information while those who would try to correct them have few. In addition,  the marketplace of ideas can’t work well in the online world where “individuals are … in their own echo chambers … such that counterspeech may be of limited effect.”

Moreover, Furman University Professor P.L. Thomas gets it right when he says, “Technology has created a sort of bastardized marketplace of ideas on social media sites…, (where) 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. Done right, it doesn’t prevent anyone from expressing an opinion. It just stops them from backing up their opinions with false information. 

Of course, fact-checking is neither a cure-all for social media problems nor an unproblematic good. It has a complex and not entirely unproblematic history.

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Publications like The New Yorker started fact-checking in 1927 “following the publication of an egregiously inaccurate profile of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.” It quickly became a way to exploit cheap female labor at a time when there were few opportunities for women.

Henry Luce once called Time’s fact-checkers “a modern female priesthood.”

Beyond its problematic social history, even “A perfectly checked article… can still be fundamentally wrong about its assumptions or conclusions.” In addition, fact-checking can create an environment where “the accumulation of verifiable minutiae can become an end unto itself.”

Finally, a 2020 study of the psychology of fact-checking found that “any individual fact checker’s personal or political biases can influence what they confirm as genuine, and what they even deem worthy of checking in the first place.” 

In the end, however, none of that sealed the fate of Meta’s fact-checking enterprise. It was sealed when fact-checking in the mainstream press entered the political world, with publications like the Washington Post investing a lot of time and energy to keep a running total of lies told by President Trump. That’s why Zuckerberg could be confident that ending fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram would be welcomed in Trump’s world. 

Trump confirmed that at a news conference the same day Zuckerberg made his announcement.  “Trump — who in the past has derided Zuckerberg, threatening the CEO with prison,” The Washington Post said, “praised the move, saying, ‘I think they’ve come a long way.’” 

When asked whether he thought Zuckerberg was changing policy in response to Trump’s past threats, the president-elect replied, “Probably.” 

Welcome, Mark Zuckerberg, to Donald Trump’s America. In that America, all of us must remember Arendt’s wisdom: “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.” None of Zuckerberg’s gaslighting can hide that truth.