No Fact-Checking and More Hate Speech: Meta Goes MAGA

Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.”

In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking his new curly hairdo and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale parroted talking points that right-wing legislators, pundits, and Trump himself have been hammering for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t coy about the timing, explicitly saying the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he said in the video.

In Zuckerberg’s telling, the main impetus for the change is the desire to boost “free expression.” Meta’s social networks had become too extreme in restricting the speech of users, he said, so the thrust of the changes—which included ending Meta’s multiyear partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations and retreating from efforts to diminish the spread of hate speech—is to let freedom ring, even if it means “we’re gonna catch less bad stuff.”

Leave a Comment