There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t regard mainstream media as the enemy. He even allowed me, a card-carrying legacy media person, into his home. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear his plans to do the right thing. It was part of my years-long embed into Facebook to write a book. For the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company had been roundly criticized for its failure to rein in disinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder had a plan to address this.
Part of the solution, he told me, was more content moderation. He was going to hire many more humans to vet posts, even if it cost Facebook considerable capital. He would also amp up efforts to use artificial intelligence to proactively remove harmful content. “It is no longer enough to give people tools to say what they want and then just let our community flag them and try to respond after the fact,” he told me as we sat in his sunroom. “We need to get in there more and just take a more active role.” He admitted he had been slow to realize how damaging toxic content was on Facebook, but now he was committed to fixing the problem, even though it might take years. “I think we’re doing the right thing,” he told me, “It’s just that we should’ve done it sooner.”
Seven years later, Zuckerberg no longer thinks more moderation is the right thing. In a five-minute Reel, he characterized his actions to support it as a regretful cave-in to government jawboning about Covid and other subjects. He announced a shift away from content moderation—no more proactive takedowns and downranking of misinformation and hate speech—and the end of a fact-checking program that aimed to refute lies circulating on his platforms. Fact checks by trusted sources would be replaced by “community notes,” a crowdsourcing approach where users provide alternate views on the veracity of posts. That technique is the exact thing that he told me in 2018 was “not enough.” While he admits now his changes will allow “more bad stuff,” he says that in 2025 it is worth it for more “free expression” to thrive.
The policy shift was one of several moves that indicated that, whether or not Zuckerberg wanted to do this all along, Meta is positioning itself in sync with the new Trump administration. You’ve heard the litany, which has become a meme in itself. Meta promoted its top lobbyist, former GOP operative Joel Kaplan, to chief global affairs officer; he immediately appeared on Fox News (and only Fox News) to tout the new policies. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta would move employees who write and review content from California to Texas, to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” He disbanded Meta’s DEI program. (Where is Sheryl Sandberg, who was so proud of Meta’s diversity effort. Sheryl? Sheryl?) And Meta changed some of its service terms specifically to allow users to degrade LGBTQ people.
Now that it’s been a week since Meta’s turnaround—and my first take at Zuckerberg’s speech—I am particularly haunted by one aspect: He seems to have downranked the basic practice of classic journalism, characterizing it as no better than the nonreported observations from podcasters, influencers, and countless random people on his platforms. This was hinted at in his Reel when he repeatedly used the term “legacy media” as a pejorative: a force that, in his view, urges censorship and stifles free expression. All this time I thought the opposite!
A hint of his revised version of trustworthiness comes from the shift from fact-checkers to community notes. It’s true that the fact-checking process wasn’t working well—in part because Zuckerberg didn’t defend the checkers when ill-intentioned critics charged them with bias. It’s also reasonable to expect community notes to be a useful signal that a post might be fallacious. But the power of refutation fails when participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved by convincing evidence. That’s a core difference between fact-checking—which Zuckerberg got rid of— and the community notes he’s implementing. The fact-checking worldview assumes that definitive facts, arrived at via research, talking to people, and sometimes even believing your own eyes, can be conclusive. The trick is recognizing authorities who have earned public confidence by pursuing truth. Community notes welcome alternate views—but judging which ones are reliable is all up to you. There’s something to the canard that an antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if verifiable facts can’t successfully refute easily disproven flapdoodle, we’re stuck in a suicidal quicksand of babel.
That’s the world that Donald Trump, Zuckerberg’s new role model, has consciously set about to realize. 60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl once asked Trump why he insulted reporters who were just doing their job. “You know why I do it?” he responded. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.” In 2021, Trump further revealed his intent to benefit from an attack on truth. “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you,” he said during a rally. A corollary to that is if social media promotes falsehoods enough, people will believe those as well. Especially if formerly recognized authorities are discredited and demeaned.
