Mark Zuckerberg turns his back on the media

There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t consider mainstream media the enemy. He even let me, an old media personality, into his house. In April 2018, I went there to hear his plans to do the right thing. It was part of my years-long writing on Facebook book. Over the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company has come under fire for failing to rein in misinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder has a plan to address this.

part of the solution, He told me It was more moderate in content. He intended to hire more people to vet posts, even if it cost Facebook a lot of capital. It will also step up efforts to use artificial intelligence to proactively remove harmful content. “It is no longer enough to give people the tools to say what they want and then allow our community to just point at them and try to respond after the fact,” he told me as we sat in his sunroom. “We need to get out there more and take a more active role.” He admitted that he was slow to realize the extent of the damage caused by toxic content on Facebook, but he is now committed to fixing the problem, although it may take years. “I think we’re doing the right thing, it’s just that we should have done it sooner,” he told me.

Seven years later, Zuckerberg no longer believes more moderation is the right thing. in Five-minute reelHe described his actions in support of her as an unfortunate capitulation to government pressure over Covid and other topics. He announced a shift away from content moderation — no more proactive takedowns and downgrading of misinformation and hate speech — and the end of a fact-checking program aimed at debunking falsehoods circulating on his platforms. Fact checks by trusted sources will be replaced with “community feedback,” a crowdsourcing approach where users offer alternative viewpoints on the veracity of posts. This technology is exactly what he told me in 2018 was “not enough.” While he now admits that his changes will allow “more bad things”, he says that in 2025, it is worth it for more “freedom of expression” to flourish.

The policy shift was one of several moves that signaled that whether Zuckerberg wanted to do it all along or not, Meta is positioning itself in sync with the new Trump administration. I heard the prayer, which became 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 promote the new policies. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta will move employees who write and review content from California to Texas, “to help eliminate concerns about biased employees over-censoring content.” He solved Meta’s DEI program. (Where’s Sheryl Sandberg, who was so proud of Meta’s diversity efforts. Sheryl? Cheryl?) and Meta changed some of its terms of service specifically to allow users to do this Demeans LGBTQ people.

Now a week into the Meta transformation, and My first take One aspect of Zuckerberg’s speech in particular haunts me: he seems to have belittled the basic practice of classical journalism, describing it as no better than unreported observations from podcasters, influencers, and countless random people on his platforms. This is hinted at in his book Reel when he repeatedly uses the term “legacy media” as a pejorative: a force that, in his view, encourages censorship and stifles freedom of expression. All this time I thought the opposite!

The hint at his revised version of trustworthiness comes from the shift from fact-checkers to community feedback. It is true that the fact-checking process did not work well, in part because Zuckerberg did not defend the fact-checkers when ill-intentioned critics accused them of bias. It is also reasonable to expect community feedback to be a useful indication that a post may be wrong. But the power of refutation fails when participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved through convincing evidence. This is the fundamental difference between fact-checking – which Zuckerberg has done away with – and noticing that the community is implementing it. The fact-checking worldview assumes that final facts, arrived at by researching, talking to people, and sometimes even believing their eyes, can be conclusive. The trick is to acknowledge the authorities who have earned the public’s trust by pursuing the truth. Community Feedback welcomes alternative opinions, but deciding which ones to rely on is up to you. There is a falsehood that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if verifiable facts cannot refute the easily disproven nonsense, we are stuck in the suicidal quicksand of Babylon.

This is the world that Donald Trump, Zuckerberg’s new model, consciously set out to bring about. 60 minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl Trump once asked Why did he insult reporters who were just doing their jobs. “Do you know why I do that?” He replied. “I’m doing this to discredit and belittle all of you, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.” In 2021, Trump And he revealed as well His intention is to benefit from the attack on the truth. “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they will start to believe you,” he said during a rally. The corollary to this is that if social media promotes lies enough, people will believe them too. Especially if the previously recognized authorities are discredited and disgraced.