The “Muskification” of Meta and the free speech, fact-checking charade

By Mischa Geracoulis and Mickey Huff

On January 7, 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on “Fox & Friends” that the recent US elections point toward the need to prioritize free speech, proclaiming that Meta’s fact-checkers have been too politically biased.

Meta’s new global policy chief, former deputy chief-of-staff in the George W. Bush White House and energy lobbyist, Joel Kaplan, lauded Meta for returning to its free expression roots. No stranger to Meta, during Trump’s first reign, the GOP operative oversaw changes to Facebook’s algorithm to promote right-wing content and advocated against restricting racially incendiary and conservative content.

The Biden Administration also had influence over Meta’s algorithms, as Zuckerberg revealed to Joe Rogan and the House Judiciary Committee. According to Zuckerberg, under the guise of fact-checking, Facebook was pressured to “moderate” (ie. censor) certain information, too, especially around issues like the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 origin, and pandemic policies (including satire and humorous posts). In a recent letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg lamented, “I believe the government was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” He also noted that tech companies should not cave to political pressures in either direction.

Zuckerberg’s statements and revelations to Rogan, however, contradict that Meta—and other social media platforms, as documented by the Twitter Files—actually do fall in line with the reigning political party. This is deeply problematic in both aforementioned examples as it acts to further erode public trust. Time will tell, but if past is prologue, it appears the opposite has been the trend with Big Tech kowtowing to the political establishment.

Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network and former PolitiFact editor-in-chief, who also served on Facebook’s original fact-checking team, told Poynter that Meta’s 180-degree turn on fact-checking appears as though Zuckerberg is seeking to please Trump and, once again, to conform with the goals of the right.

Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and a crusader against Musk’s ill-defined “woke mind virus,” has claimed that wokeness is  “very focused” on identity politics, a form of Marxism, and cancel culture. He called Zuckerberg’s decision to end content moderation a “huge win for free speech.”

As X (formerly Twitter) had previously done, Meta plans to switch to crowdsourced fact-checking, allowing volunteer users of the site to write “alternative views on the veracity of posts.” Assuming Meta’s community notes will function like those on X, posts will only be visible to all users if the other volunteers vote to approve the note. Also like X, Meta has plans to relocate its in-house Trust and Safety team from Democratic-run California to Republican-run Texas.

Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, wrote in his Substack, Faked Up, that Meta had every right to terminate its contract. “But getting rid of fact-checkers in this manner was politics, not policy.” If Zuckerberg sincerely believes that crowdsourced efforts are unbiased and pro-speech, he might want to check the research that indicates X Community Notes users are motivated by partisanship and tend to overrate their political adversaries, said Mantzarlis.

Accountable Tech, an organization that advocates for restrictions to free speech online, asserts that Big Tech was never designed to serve the public good but, first and foremost, to generate profits. Operating under a surveillance advertising model, Big Tech companies “allow bad actors to weaponize data-rich platforms to manipulate consumers [and] create echo chambers and false realities for their users.” Surveillance advertising, says the organization, undermines the news and information ecosystem, particularly local journalism, which is already in decline with the spread of news deserts.

Tech Bros go to Washington

Following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, slated to co-chair the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Zuckerberg and other Big Tech CEOs made pre-inauguration pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration. Taking a cue from the Silicon Valley CEOs, even New York City mayor Eric Adams turned up at Mar-a-Lago just days before the inauguration, presumably hoping to dodge 2024 corruption charges for accepting bribes from and conspiring with the Turkish government.

The Billionaire Row Big Tech CEOs who attended Trump’s inauguration, including Musk, Zuckerberg, Amazon/Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, had “better seats than most of the cabinet members.” The opulent optics of that inaugural spectacle did not come about by accident. They were crafted to convey a clear message about who was lining up to support the new Trump administration, with Big Tech’s oligarchs and the digital information interests they represent positioned at the forefront. The role these entities play moving forward should be carefully scrutinized, especially around issues of narrative control, agenda setting, and censorship in service of Trump and the MAGA GOP.

Anti-censorship or anti-regulation?

If Zuckerberg is sincere in wanting to reduce social media censorship, Snopes CEO Chris Richmond told MSNBC, the case for user-led, crowdsourced fact-checking offers transparency, compared to Meta’s existing black box. Volunteers in a Community Notes-type setting cannot, however, keep up with the sheer volume of content. Nor can they achieve consensus on truth in an increasingly polarized and opinion-driven social media world, which explains why only a small percentage of X Community Notes ever see the light of day.

Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project, said that Zuckerberg’s decision was about getting on Trump’s good side to avoid regulatory scrutiny. In 2020, the Trump administration filed an antitrust suit against Zuckerberg—if Trump chooses to proceed, the suit is set to go to trial in 2025. Stoller said Zuckerberg is more motivated by the pending trial than free speech.

The end of DEI could lead to real-life harms

Meta joins the growing list of companies—including Target, McDonald’s, Walmart, Boeing, Molson Coors, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, and Amazon—that are ending or scaling back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is “culturally neutered” and could do with more masculine energy and aggression. Statistics show, nevertheless, that women comprise just 25 to 35 percent of tech jobs in the US, and only 11 percent hold executive positions. Juliet A. Williams, gender studies professor and Social Science Interdepartmental Program chair at UCLA, asserts that the term “neutered” is gendered dog whistling that promotes gender traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

St. John’s University law professor Kate Klonick told The Intercept, “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Director General Thibaut Bruttin has stated the “‘Muskification’ of the Meta group’s platforms obeys a political strategy that allows private sector interests to prevail over the need for a public conversation based on facts.” Signaling hostility toward journalism, Meta is accentuating its disengagement from the universal right to access reliable news and information, “reinforcing a model based on virality, at the risk of amplifying hate speech, manipulation and false information,” Bruttin wrote.

The end of Meta’s DEI programs applies to hiring and employee training practices and selecting suppliers, according to a new employee memo obtained by Axios. Issued by Meta’s VP of human resources, Janelle Gale, the memo states that the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing…The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

Meta’s internal employee training materials obtained by The Intercept give examples of the newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram, highlighting a wide variety of comments denigrating people based on traits such as race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity. “Trans people are mentally ill” is allowed, for example, as is “Mexican immigrants are trash!”

The reason for drawing lines in the first place was “because hate speech often doesn’t stay speech, it turns into real-world conduct,” said Klonick, the St. John’s law professor. Now though, statements of contempt and name-calling, such as “tranny,” and “[r]eferring to the target as genitalia or anus,” are considered “non-violating” and will be permitted.

Reporters at the Electronic Frontier Foundation posit these changes could “result in less censorship of expression, for which Meta has long been criticized by the global digital rights community, artists, sex worker advocacy groups, LGBTQ+ advocates, Palestine advocates, and political groups.” However, the changes are being selectively rolled out and could also allow for more anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans speech. Instead of addressing the historically over-moderated subjects, Meta is taking the opposite tack “to the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted,” The Intercept reported.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Board and former prime minister of Denmark, has pointed out problems with Meta’s changes, saying, “We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm.”

Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan wrote in The Guardian on January 8, 2025, that Zuckerberg has gone “full MAGA.” Vaidhyanathan stated that Meta’s third-party fact-checking “was never about facts nor should it have been” but was “about limiting harm to Facebook users and advertisers.” Even with Facebook’s track record of silencing and marginalizing oppressed groups and its lack of a transparent content moderation policy, it worked to some degree to limit certain forms of harassment, said Vaidhyanathan.

At the same time, some of Meta’s fact-checkers came from ideologically biased organizations, such as the Atlantic Council, that promote content aligned with US and NATO policies. In 2023, Human Rights Watch found that Meta’s third-party operations had a history of “overbroad crackdowns on content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook,” failing to meet Meta’s human rights due diligence responsibilities. “The Facebook Files” revealed that “in 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured [Meta] teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content.” According to Zuckerberg, “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Time will tell, but not even one month into the second Trump presidency and the only pushing seems to have been by those jockeying for million-dollar front-row seats at Trump’s coronation.

The Technogarchy displaces democracy and journalism

The new changes will also permit users to post more acerbic criticism of ethnicity and nationality, which has been at issue in places such as the Philippines and Myanmar and that RSF finds troubling. At present, Meta’s changes only apply to its users in the United States, but RSF warned that new US policies might foreshadow “a global strategy of marginalizing journalism and its actors in the name of a freedom of expression perverted to serve ideological interests.”

Amnesty International reported that in 2017, Facebook’s algorithms “substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people.” How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Philippine journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s 2022 book, documents Facebook’s role in disseminating dangerous disinformation during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential campaign and election, which was “accomplished with a loyal ‘troll army’ that boosted pro-Duterte narratives on social media, while smashing down opposition.”

Ressa warns that Meta’s end to fact-checking and DEI policies come down to safety issues. A “world without facts” becomes “a world that’s right for a dictator.” Ressa is right to be concerned. However, there is an elitist assumption at play here, based on tacit faith in those fact-checkers as infallible, unbiased judges of complex, charged issues such as DEI policy or Russiagate. Ascribing to any individual or group a monopoly on the truth stifles legitimate debate about such controversial issues. Despite its best intentions, a protectionist approach to fact-checking may inadvertently undermine public trust when members of the public discover that fact-checking organizations have stifled fact-based perspectives deemed to be unpalatable. More broadly, as suggested previously, this furthers the erosion of public trust especially in government institutions and the Fourth Estate, both of which are near or at record-low approval ratings, according to the Pew Research Center.

Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar and author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East (2022), views Zuckerberg’s changes as indicative of the U.S’s move toward authoritarianism, which thrives in an environment of disinformation and a manufactured “war against reality.” Getting rid of fact-checkers, Jones told Democracy Now!, signals acquiesce to Trump’s demands, perpetuates the right-wing notion that the United States suffers from a crisis of censorship, and promotes what Jones has elsewhere called “institutionalized violence by algorithm.”

Vaidhyanathan sees it differently because, according to him, in the United States, the government worships corporations. Zuckerberg is not bowing to Trump, but the other way around, Vaidhyanathan told Democracy Now!. “Zuckerberg always gets what he wants out of the United States government,” Vaidhyanathan asserted, adding that, now, Zuckerberg “sees an opportunity to get even more of what he wants out of the Trump administration.”

A win against censorship or against the competition?

In 2022, Meta paid Targeted Victory, a Republican consulting firm, to run a national campaign to take out its main competitor, TikTok, by “placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook.” The 2021 internal Facebook report leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed Meta’s anxiety over young people’s preference for TikTok over Facebook or Instagram.

Drop Site News correspondent Jessica Burbank said the 12-hour TikTok ban on January 19, 2025—initially upheld by the Supreme Court and subsequently suspended by a Trump executive order—portends an era in which a US president has the power to determine how and with whom citizens can communicate outside national borders. Although the fate of TikTok remains uncertain, the case highlights the influence of Big Tech not only in the market but also in legislation and SCOTUS decisions that impact free speech, free expression, and a free press.

Tech reporter Kara Swisher, who’s long covered Zuckerberg, called Meta’s moves “cynical” and told the BBC that “Facebook does whatever is in its self-interest.” Given Meta’s 2022 Targeted Victory campaign, Zuckerberg’s free speech yammering reveals a double standard. Moreover, as billionaire private tech company owners align themselves with whatever administration occupies the White House, they threaten democracy by crossing the wires of private and public power.

The evergreen need for independent journalism and critical media literacy

Meta’s changes ultimately point to a more productive solution—the evergreen necessity of independent media and critical media literacy. Crowdsourced content, pundit-driven infotainment, and AI can never replace research, investigative journalism founded on ethical reporting practices, and critical thinking skills. It’s only been since 2016 that fact-checking, under the purview of Big Tech, became an entity separate from the job of journalism, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi has noted. That’s a problem best addressed by educators and journalists, not outsourced to Big Tech.

Social media, even in the presence of fact-checkers, was never, and can never, serve as a replacement for the work of an independent free press— one that not only checks facts, but checks the power of Big Tech, government, and the corporate media, holding them accountable to the public.