Fact Checking Checks Out: The Beginning of the End for Facebook?
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This week, Mark Zuckerberg has once again changed the rules of the game for Facebook. As unspectacular as it sounds, the consequences are far reaching. In this opinion piece, I explain what happened exactly, what's behind the story, and why I think it could be a deadly risk for social media overall.
Do you stil remember 2024? That annus horribilis, with wars, weather disasters, a shift to the right in many countries, and Trump winning the USA election? We were stupid enough to believe that things couldn't get any worse. What about now? The year is only a week old and we have had Elon Musk who expressed interest to purchase Liverpool FC, having insulted German politicians, and made advances towards the AfD and, in other countries, shifting towards comparable right-wing populist parties and media giants such as the Springer publishing house.
We also have the aforementioned Trump, who wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America", intends to seize the Panama Canal back, and also wants to incorporate Canada and Greenland into the USA. When asked about those two countries, Trump didn't even want to rule out military action explicitly! He even sent his son to Greenland to see if the islanders were up for MAGA.
These are Truly Difficult, Complex Times
Why am I bringing all these up? This is because we are living in times ...
- ... when facts often no longer play the role they should.
- ... where AI makes it even easier for anyone to create fake news and spread it among the populace.
- ... where billionaires like Mathias Döpfner (Axel Springer publishing group) or Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) have overwhelming media power.
- ... where billionaires (especially from the tech world) crawl so far up Trump's ass that you no longer know where one's ass begins and the other ends.
In view of this entire, nasty mess of entanglements, we urgently need to look at the cold, hard facts. We need to recognize facts, take facts into account when forming our opinions, and make sure we recognize facts as a society, use them as a basis for discussion, and share them with others.
If we don't ensure facts are our basis for discussion, things like what we saw on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter will happen. There is an unwanted proliferation of populists, fascists, openly right-wing radicals, misogynists, and similar social misanthropes. They are led by the owner of the platform, who not only tolerates fake news, insults, and conspiracy theories, but also enthusiastically shares them himself.
Mark Zuckerberg Abolishes Fact-Checking
Yes, I've come a long way down the rabbit hole now, but for a good reason, in my opinion. We need to take everything into account to realize how important it is we are able to trust entities that fact-check news. On January 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he no longer wants fact-checking to happen!
He will, beginning with the USA, put these neutral fact-checkers out to pastore and replace them with so-called community notes. This is exactly the path Twitter took which demonstrably made everything worse there. Zuckerberg also explicitly referred to "X", so he is now deliberately going down this route spearheaded by Elon Musk.
These community notes stipulate that users of Meta platforms will now take care of the problem. You can add notes to posts on Facebook, Threads, or Instagram in the USA. Hence, it is up to the users to decide whether something is true or not. In the case of false reports, explanatory warnings are also written in a smaller font, as nothing should disrupt the nice, smooth flow when scrolling.
Zuckerberg mentioned that he wants to return to his roots and stand up for the freedom of expression. That's not all, though.
In the case of minor infringements, posts in the future would only be fact-checked after user complaints have been received; algorithms will also only intervene at a higher threshold. After Meta recently had a higher tendency to suppress political and social topics, these are now set to come under the spotlight once again.
So far, the fact-checkers have not (yet) been discussed in the EU. However, Meta plans to tackle governments in other countries alongside the upcoming US President Trump. In this context, Zuckerberg talked about taking action against "censorship" together with Trump. The important thing about the entire debacle is how they only want to deal with the "more serious" offenses. In the case of 'minor' offenses such as denying the Holocaust or the statement that homosexuals are mentally ill, they will turn their heads the other way and label it as freedom of expression!
Why is the New Path by Meta So Wrong?
First of all, this is my opinion—there is a mistake in the way Americans define 'freedom of expression'. It's hard for me to talk the USA out of it, but they simply place this "anyone can say what they want" mantra on too high a pedestal. The limit should be where you infringe on the rights of others and where you knowingly say the wrong thing.
Please don't think that Mark Zuckerberg chose January 7th by chance. Rather, it was exactly four years ago to the day Donald Trump was fired from Facebook—one day after the storming of the Capitol in 2021. Now, he's sitting there with a wild mane, necklace, and $900,000 watch and looks to me like someone who doesn't really like saying what he's saying. It's more reminiscent of prisoners of a regime who are supposed to claim on camera: "Hey, everything's fine here, they're treating me really well, I was not tortured nor ill-treated."
He has made a remarkable change of attitude towards Trump over the recent weeks and months. I maintain that you would not be reading this and there would have been no announcement from him if Kamala Harris had been elected to office. There sits an opportunist who publicly confirmed that he is now part of Team Trump!
This also includes other personnel issues within the Group: Nick Clegg, a former British Deputy Prime Minister with excellent connections in the EU, will be leaving Meta. He will be replaced. Joel Kaplan is a Republican who already served in the White House under George W. Bush. Hence, Zuckerberg is also going full MAGA on the board and signaling to Trump that Meta is no longer the "enemy of the people" as Trump had called Facebook during the election campaign, and also threatened Mark Zuckerberg that he would put him in prison for life.
Why is what Facebook and Meta doing wrong? Because I believe that these docile, positive statements about wanting to go "return to my roots", making the rules "simpler" and actually only "standing up for freedom of expression" are simply poisonous statements.
Hopefully we can all agree that real protection against false statements has never really worked on Facebook either way. It has always been annoying for the company to have to somehow take responsibility for what others say on the platform. With the rule change, Zuckerberg is now unleashing the massive negative potential that we have seen on Twitter. It's not even about freedom of expression per see anymore, as we are already entitled to this under the German constitution. It's more about "people who INTENTIONALLY spread lies and STRATEGICALLY insult others having an easier time in future", as the German SPD politician Robin Mesarosch aptly put it.
I don't know which country you are reading this article from, but at least here in Germany and in the EU, we have failed to intervene via the regulatory route. Yes, we have the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA)—instruments that are supposed to keep MAGA, er, Meta, in check, but which are clearly turning out to be somewhat toothless tigers.
Despite all the joy that the EU is taking steps far ahead of the USA, I still have the feeling that for almost 20 years now, they have failed to make it clear to users of major social media platforms: The internet is not a legal vacuum! Of course, I can report hate speech and yes, there are always reports that even politicians have actually been fined for claims made on social media.
But we are facing massive troll armies and millions of bots in the battle for the sovereignty of online interpretation. Please forget the idea that you have to remain on "X", for example, to confront your right-wing political opponents and fight for freedom with counter-speech. As long as a completely crazy man who has drifted to the far right (who is also the richest person in the world) decides what you see and what you don't see, it does feel futile.
The same man sits in Trump's head, takes part in Trump's global political discussions, has also had a direct line to Putin in recent years, is indispensable to NASA and the USA with the SpaceX program, and recently started calling politicians out across the board, regardless of whether they are in Germany, the UK, Canada, or anywhere else.
This development is a disaster—and that's why it's an even bigger disaster when the head of Facebook, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp also follows this course now. Before I arrive at my conclusion, I'll try to quickly come up with at least one positive thought:
The Delicate Little Plant of Hope
Yes, I still have a very small, tender seedling of hope. Zuckerberg is not Musk! Musk didn't become the richest man in the world through a social media platform. He could drive Twitter completely to the ground (which he is, in fact, doing, and users and advertisers have run away in droves), he still has SpaceX and, above all, Tesla.
However, Mark Zuckerberg's corporate structure is almost exclusively made up of platforms that rely on advertising revenue. If there is an exodus here similar to that of X, Zuckerberg will have to react. He won't get very far with the erratic "don't give a shit" attitude of Elon Musk.
Hence, it's possible that Meta will make a U-turn on the matter and perhaps think things through better. However, I don't dare predict whether the industry won't also change its mind and advertising partners will slowly start thinking about joining Team Trump. We will see.
Conclusion: Social Media as We Know It is History
I sincerely hope I'm wrong. I am currently disillusioned and fear the kind of social media we have enjoyed for years has now been buried for good. Mark Zuckerberg's pivot, with all that it entails, is the nail in the coffin for social media. Topics and discourses are no longer in our hands! It controls which opinions are more likely to be seen (and heard) and which are not.
Look at Trump's cabinet: it looks like the freakiest Muppet show in the world! In fact, Trump is gathering his cronies there—all of them extremely wealthy and one hundred percent loyal to Trump. The policies which Trump pretends to be there for the little people actually represent the interests of billionaires. Billionaires own the media and billionaires own and control social media platforms. The platforms of Meta and "X" (and let's not forget TikTok) have long been flooded with deliberate lies and false statements, hate, and incitement.
This is a terrible development in times when neo-Nazism and neo-imperialism are gaining ground. If even Mark Zuckerberg now caves in to become part of Trump's 'bro'ligarchy, the last bit of hope in me that social media as we know it will continue to exist will wither away.
I can't imagine what a new kind of social media will look like in the future. Will we gradually move away from these platforms, with only chatbots communicating with each other then? I have no idea!
I would like to conclude on a more positive note, but at the moment I lack the vision, the hope, and the trust of the decision-makers in politics. Can I give you something encouraging and constructive to take with you? No, unfortunately not. What I can say is this: I'm off Twitter, I'll be significantly scaling back my activities on Meta's platforms, and I can be found on Bluesky. Maybe I'll see you there!
Bear with me if this has become a difficult, less encouraging read. Feel free to tell me in the comments if you think I'm too pessimistic, point out possible solutions and, of course, discuss this situation in general!
Source: Politico, Tagesschau
