Mark Zuckerberg Turns His Back on the Media

There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t consider the mainstream media the enemy. He even let me, a card-carrying legacy media person, into his home. In April 2018, I went there to hear his plan to do the right thing. Writing this was part of my year-long embed on Facebook a book. Over the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company has been roundly criticized for its failure to rein in misinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder had a plan to counter it.

part of the solution, he told me More content was moderated. He’s going to hire a lot more people to post, even if Facebook spends a lot of capital. He will also increase efforts to use artificial intelligence to proactively remove harmful content. “It’s no longer enough to give people the tools to say what they want and then 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 take a more active role.” He admits he was slow to realize how harmful toxic content was on Facebook, but now he’s committed to fixing the problem, even though it may take years. “I think we’re doing the right thing,” he told me, “that we should have done sooner.”

Seven years later, Zuckerberg no longer thinks more moderation is the right thing. in A five-minute reelHe characterized his actions as a contrite caveat to government jaw-dropping on Covid and other issues. He announced a move away from content moderation — no more active takedowns and down-ranking of misinformation and hate speech — and the end of a fact-checking program aimed at debunking falsehoods spread on his platforms. Verification by trusted sources will be replaced by “community notes,” a crowdsourcing method where users provide alternative opinions about the veracity of posts. The strategy he told me in 2018 was “not enough.” Although he now admits his changes will allow for “worse stuff”, he says it’s worth it to promote more “free expression” in 2025.

The policy change was one of several moves that indicate that, whether or not Zuckerberg intended to do it all, Meta is staying in sync with the new Trump administration. You’ve heard the litany, which itself has become a meme. 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 demand new policies. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta will move employees who write and review content from California to Texas, “to help address concerns that biased staff are over-censoring content.” He dismantled the Mater DEI program. (Where’s Sheryl Sandberg, who was so proud of Meta’s diversity efforts. Sheryl? Sheryl?) and has changed some of its terms of service specifically to allow Meta users Degradation of LGBTQ people.

Now that Mater has turned around—and it’s been a week My first take In Zuckerberg’s speech—I’m particularly haunted by one aspect: He seems to downplay the basic practice of classic journalism, characterizing it as better than unreported observations from podcasters, influencers, and the countless random people on his platform. This was hinted at in his relay when he repeatedly used the term “legacy media” as a pejorative: a force that, in his view, calls for censorship and stifles free expression. So long I thought the opposite!

An indication of his revised version of credibility comes from the shift from fact-checkers to community notes. It’s true that the fact-checking process wasn’t working well — because Zuckerberg didn’t defend the checkers when ill-intentioned critics accused them of bias. It is also reasonable to expect community notes to be a useful signal that a post may be incorrect But the power of refutation fails when the participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved through evidence. That’s a key difference between fact-checking—which Zuckerberg got rid of—and the community notes he’s implementing. The fact-checking worldview assumes that certain facts, arrived at through research, talking to people, and sometimes trusting one’s own eyes, can be conclusive. The strategy is recognizing authorities who have earned public trust by following the truth. Community Notes welcomes alternative opinions—but it’s up to you to judge which ones are reliable. The canard has it that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if verifiable facts cannot successfully refute unsubstantiated flapdoodle, then we are stuck in a suicidal quicksand babble.

This is the world that Zuckerberg’s new role model, Donald Trump, is about to consciously perceive. 60 minutes Reporter Leslie Stahl once asked Trump Why did he insult journalists who were just doing their job? “You know why I do it?” He responded. “I do this to humiliate you all and humiliate you all so that no one will believe you when you write negative stories about me.” In 2021, Trump revealed more His intention is to profit from the attack on the truth. “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they will start to believe you,” he told a rally. A reflection of this is that if social media spreads enough lies, people will believe them too. Especially if previously recognized authority is disrespected and degraded.