Trump back in power, Mark Zuckerberg uses it to throw facts under the bus

Facts are never convenient. Just take a look around you, at your friends and family members, at people who you see, or just have a closer look at your thoughts, and you will realise that facts are almost always inconvenient.

Because facts are inconvenient, everyone tries to avoid them. Silicon Valley, full of vaunted and utopian-sounding tech companies, never cared much for facts. That is until 2015-16 when the misinformation and this apathy for facts became such a big problem that it erupted in a number of scandals.

The biggest of these was the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO, moved to contain the damage around the same time Donald Trump entered the White House. He declared that facts were important because lies, which spread through Facebook, might have helped some politicians. This was the beginning of institutional “fact-checking” at Facebook. On January 8, as Trump is on the verge of starting his second term as the US president, Facebook is now officially ending its “fact-checking.”

What a turnaround in just 8 short years! Mark Zuckerberg announced the change in a quick video. To ensure that people get the message, Meta chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan then went on Fox & friends to reiterate everything that Zuckerberg said.

The times are changing, said Zuckerberg as he highlighted that facts are no longer as important as speech. “The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech,” he said. “So, we’re restoring free expression on our platforms (and) going to get rid of fact-checkers.”

It is quite clear why Zuckerberg is doing so. There are two aspects to it — both fairly evident.

The move to downgrade facts comes just two weeks before Trump re-enters the White House. When Trump lost elections in 2020, the tech industry which had spent the previous four years fighting him, heaved a sigh of relief and moved quickly to de-platform him. Both Twitter and Facebook banned Trump in the subsequent months. Twitter aka X lifted the ban after Elon Musk bought it. Facebook restored his account in January 2023, but with added surveillance. Then, in the middle of the last year, when it became apparent that Trump might win, the account was restored fully.

Now, with Trump set to take oath as the next US president, big tech is trying to get back into his good books for a variety of reasons. Everyone is sweating and working hard. Some tech CEOs have pledged to donate money for Trump’s inauguration ceremony. Some are making all the “right” noises. Zuckerberg, in the manner of extending an olive branch, is simply getting rid of “fact checking” across his platform, the kind of fact checking that would often target outlandish claims made by Trump supporters.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said on January 8. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

Read between the lines and you will realise that Zuckerberg, by getting rid of “fact checking,” is simply moving to give the sort of blank check to Trump supporters as far as sharing information — or misinformation — is concerned on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Well, to Trump supporters as well as to everyone else.

But it is also self-serving in another way

However, getting into the good books of Trump is only half the story here. Mark Zuckerberg by any measure is a smart person. He is near genius if you look at what he has accomplished and achieved. He is also extremely savvy. Zuckerberg, like most other founders and CEOs in Silicon Valley, is not a fan of regulations. Whether necessary or unnecessary, regulations always irk tech big-wigs like Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. They want to create and do things with minimal restrictions and regulations. They believe that many rules, or tasks like fact-checking every bit of information that flows on their platforms, do nothing more than slow them down.

Regulating something costs time, people and money. At the same time, people and money can be better used, or so the tech founders argue, in creating and building something.

When Facebook started its fact-checking program, and created Facebook Content Oversight Board with people like Alan Rusbridger in it, Zuckerberg did so under tremendous pressure. He was facing serious heat from the media and from regulators across the world in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fact-checking program was not really meant to “fact check” but was instead an attempt to ride the tough times.

That moment of difficulty has passed. Facts no longer matter anymore and we truly are, as Zuckerberg says, at a “cultural tipping point.” In other words, this is an opportune moment for Zuckerberg to get out of doing something he was never comfortable with. By getting rid of the fact-checking program, and forcing this checking business back on users by means of Community Notes, just like Elon Musk over at Twitter does, Meta is not just going to save money but also going to avoid the headache that comes by taking responsibility for something.

You see, facts are facts. The problem Zuckerberg cites — “the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created” — can be solved differently. It doesn’t require getting rid of facts or fact-checking units. Instead, the solution could be to double down on facts and have teams and mechanisms robust enough to overcome political bias fact-checkers might have, whether that bias is left-leaning or right.

But that is not what Zuckerberg is deciding. He is going back to the classic Silicon Valley adage that is we are not the “arbiters of truth.” In 2020, even while Facebook had an institutionalised fact-checking programme, Zuckerberg was not in favour of it. In an interview with CNBC, he said, “I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth… Political speech is one of the most sensitive parts of a democracy, and people should be able to see what politicians say.”

Unfortunately for him and Facebook until now it was nearly impossible to get out of the fact-checking that the website was forced to start 8 years ago. Such a move would have angered government regulators and would have given the media a chance to again go after Meta. But now with Trump back in power, there is an opportunity. Zuckerberg is seizing it gleefully.