Mark Zuckerberg and his social media sites have been catapulted into the public eye once again after his latest policy changes at Facebook. Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be doing away with its fact-checkers on its social media sites in favour of a community notes type system that has been implemented on Elon Musk’s X (formally Twitter) platform. Depending on what side of the political aisle you are on, this announcement may be seen as either a step in the right direction or a dangerous action that could lead to the spread of more disinformation.
It is certainly the case that this move by Zuckerberg is part of his wider shift towards appeasing the incoming Trump Administration. Along with this latest policy change, we have seen other announcements such as Dana White, a prominent Trump ally, being selected to join Meta’s board of directors. Moreover, it had also been announced that Joel Kaplan, a Republican, would become Meta’s head of public policy. We have even seen Meta donate one million dollars to the inauguration fund of President-Elect Donald Trump.
In addition to these policy changes, Zuckerberg has dipped his toe into some culture war battles as well. To my amusement, I saw in a post on 𝕏 that Meta would no longer allow tampons within Men’s bathrooms within its offices. Continuing in this vein, in his latest appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg lamented that the corporate world has become too feminised and “neutered”, stating that masculinity has become demonised in the corporate world.
Zuckerberg’s reasoning behind ending the fact-checking policy on its social media sites is part of a broader trend of preventing censorship on their platforms. He has claimed that in an attempt to prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation on their platforms, Meta had begun curtailing the spread of certain claims flagged as false and began using fact-checkers to correct false statements made on their platforms.
However, Zuckerberg has stated that the fact-checkers had become too politically biased and had as a result begun censoring certain types of speech on their platforms. Zuckerberg and Meta spokespersons have been highlighting Mark Zuckerberg’s famous Georgetown speech where he spoke about the importance of freedom of speech and their desire for Meta to go back to upholding the types of values he highlights during his speech.
During Zuckerberg’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, he would also further bring to light the major disputes there had been between Meta and the Biden administration over the last few years. Zuckerberg would state that there had been growing bad blood between them and the government due to the pressure the Biden administration had been putting on Meta to censor misinformation that was spreading on Meta’s platforms, particularly with regard to claims about the Covid-19 vaccine.
The reaction by many liberals and people on the left to the latest news coming out of Meta has been one of general anger and frustration. Many see this as nothing more than Zuckerberg sucking up to Trump and his allies in the hopes of getting kickbacks during his presidency, and in the process putting democracy at risk. It is not as if Zuckerberg had been a popular figure beforehand among liberals or leftist to begin with, however these latest actions perhaps only serve to cement this sentiment.
The reaction by people on the right however has not necessarily been positive towards Zuckerberg either. While there has been praise of the decision to stop censoring information, which people on the right have often been affected by, many are simply accusing Zuckerberg of only standing up for free speech now that is more politically convenient for him. As a result, there is scepticism on the right over whether this is a genuine policy that is set to stay or it will just be reversed once a democrat is elected into the White House again.
I did however find it interesting to see the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s reaction to the news. On his podcast, Ben Shapiro explained that prior to Facebook’s decision to begin fact-checking information and reducing the reach of information deemed false, Ben explained that his Facebook page had been among the pages with the most engagement on the platform.
Ben Shapiro explained that his personal page, along with his Daily Wire page, would receive billions of engagement each month, however following the changes implemented by Facebook his reach had been severely curtailed. As a result, his reach had gone down from billions of engagements to around a hundred million engagements each month on Facebook. Listening to that, it gave me at least a better idea of the extent to which the kind of political censorship Mark Zuckerberg is likely referring to.
While Ben Shapiro is a controversial figure among certain circles, I don’t think it would be accurate to state that he is a type of person who engages in the spread of misinformation. He has a very conservative worldview that he is very open about yet, I rarely see him engaging in the spread of misinformation that others on the political right are unfortunately often guilty of. So to learn about such a drastic curtailing of his Facebook engagements is a rather shocking discovery.
Also, it seems unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg would come out and say that there has been political bias involved in some decision-making by moderators if that had not in fact been the case. So if rolling back some content moderation restrictions would allow for more speech to be allowed on the platform, I would argue that is a step into the right direction, even if it would likely mean that there may be a bit more misinformation spread on Meta’s platforms.
Moreover, it is not as if all fact-checking is going away on Meta’s platforms. Zuckerberg did announce that a sort of community notes system would be put in place similar to the one that has been rolled out on 𝕏. While the Community Notes system is by no means perfect, I certainly prefer that sort of system compared to something like Reddit, for example, where all major subreddits are all heavily moderated only allowing one point of view to be tolerated.
I will always be more on the side that more speech on social media platforms is better. That is, at the end of the day, the reason we have social media in the first place, for people to be able to express themselves. That doesn’t mean that it should be a sort of lawless place where anything goes. We have certainly seen what the results of that can be from the experience on 𝕏 in the first few months after Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.
It is possible for there to be the right balance that can be struck. You can allow for a real diversity of opinion while still at the same time stopping the spread of hateful content. And if people would prefer to not engage with political discussions on the opposite side, they can always use a different site. Like for example, Bluesky has really taken off over the last few months as more liberal and left leaning people have flocked towards Bluesky in favour of 𝕏.
