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Facebook declares end of ‘fact checking’ as Zuckerberg moves closer to Trump

The reality is that Facebook has been backing away from fact-checking for years.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg never wanted fact-checking; it was forced on him by the Russiagate scam that Hillary Clinton’s people came up with, and Facebook repeatedly resisted the accusations that ‘social media ads’ or ‘disinformation’ were to blame for the 2016 election results.

But Zuckerberg needed to appease the cultural power players, so, like much of Big Tech, he shifted over to funding media censors and, much more significantly, revamping the algorithms to favor ‘inspirational’ and ‘personal’ content and punish political content.

The result is that Facebook became mostly garbage and Twitter turned into the default site for political conversations. And he also put a whole lot of his money into electing Democrats.

Now, like much of Big Tech again (see if you can spot the pattern), he swung over to the side of free speech.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said in his video remarks.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”

I’m going to highlight a few remarks here.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. So, over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.”

“Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch 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 has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So, I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”

“Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts, 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. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”

“Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.”

Zuckerberg’s use of the term “legacy media” is ‘interesting’. He’s walking a line between being Trump-friendly and Trumpian, but that’s the closest he gets to a dog whistle.

The official corporate release credits Joel Kaplan, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy for George W. Bush. He’s seen as a point of access for conservative groups of a certain stature.

More importantly Zuckerberg signaling that the algorithms may be a little bit more welcoming to political content as long as it’s ‘positive’. And that he’s going to use the support of the Trump administration to refuse requests for censorship abroad.

How sincere is any of this?

Zuckerberg, as I said, is not political. He’s a nerdy billionaire who came up with one gimmick and has yet to come up with another one.

He doesn’t want to be in the censorship business and he learns whichever way the political and cultural winds below. The key parts of his statements say as much.

When censoring politically incorrect views was in, he did it, now that it’s not, he’s out.

It’s no profile in courage but people would be surprised how many woke CEOs and corporate executives are just cowards going with the prevailing winds not just because of ‘BlackRock’ (whose influence on corporate wokeness has been overhyped) but because they just follow cultural trends, and do whatever their consultants, social set and spouses pick up from the culture.

Finally though, before people proclaim too loudly that this is the ultimate defeat for wokeness, the entire ‘disinformation’ machine was already being dismantled after the 2024 election because it served its purpose.

As I wrote then, given the chance, it will come back. Much like the BLM riots, it was a tactic. Now new tactics will emerge. And we may find them just as disturbing because they will be aimed at undermining from within.

And with that cheery thought, good night.