Fact Checking Is Bad For Business
Sources
More Speech and Fewer Mistakes. Meta (Jan. 2025)
Meta Says It Will End Its Fact-Checking Program on Social Media Posts. NY Times (Jan 2025)
A ‘Cage Match’ Between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg May Be No Joke, New York Times (July 2023)
Trump to Replace Lina Khan as FTC Chair and Taps Kimberly Guilfoyle for Greece Ambassador. Time (Dec. 2024)
Meta will appoint Republican Joel Kaplan to lead global policy team, as Nick Clegg steps down. Semafor (Jan 2025)
Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a 'community notes' system similar to X's. NBC (Jan 2025)
Random right-wing Typepad comment.
More Evidence that Conservatives Are Not Unfairly Censored on Social Media. NYU Stern (Oct 2024)
The danger of Meta’s big fact-checking changes. Vox (Jan 2025)
The effectiveness of moderating harmful online content
Transcript
In a right-wing dog whistle fueled address to the world, yesterday Mark Zuckerberg announced that all Meta platforms would be phasing out fact checkers in favor of a “community notes” feature similar to the one keeping X a bastion of free speech for all and definitely not a growing dumpster fire that only the underbelly of society cares to participate in anymore. Oh also they’re moving to Texas to avoid the appearance of bias. Obviously. But what is being touted by Meta as a move to protect the voice of the people, and ripped apart by the media as Zuck getting in line to kiss the ring, is nothing more or less than a business decision, full stop. Zuckerberg and the higher ups making these decisions at Meta don’t care about free speech or peoples’ rights or preserving democracy or any of the myriad other ideologies they have promoted over the years. They care about the bottom line, period. And they will say or do whatever it takes to ensure the well-being of that bottom line alone. Today we’re going to break down WHY all these tech billionaires are so quick to bend the knee for Trump, what this move means going forward for free speech, and what the heck we can do about it. Let’s get into it.
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Okay so first, here’s what’s been happening: yesterday Zuckerberg released this statement called “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes” which about sums up what he said–they won’t be moderating content, instead having the community add notes, at which point they may remove something if its highly illegal or they have a high level of confidence that it violates guidelines, they’re allowing more types of speech on their platforms, specifically around immigration and gender, if that gives you any idea of the type of speech they’re concerned with setting free, and they are clearly prioritizing allowing all speech, including harmful speech, over the potential for accidentally censoring things that shouldn’t be censored. Mark also lamented how hard on Meta the Biden administration has been and looks forward to working with Trump to increase free speech in the US and fight against international governments like those commies in Europe or Gina where censorship reigns supreme. Even just taken by itself, the address, which you can watch in its entirety it’s like 5 minutes and linked in my sources in the description, feels like a propaganda-laden, dog-whistle filled attempt to appease not only Trump but his allies and his base of supporters, many of whom are likely the same people who keep Facebook alive by sharing AI generated images of Jesus. But taken in context of the other actions Zuckerberg has taken recently, it’s part of a larger trend indicative of Zuckerberg’s rightward radicalization in recent years, fueled by his own personal relationships as well as, predictably, ire at the government for making him not do bad things, which all billionaires and heads of big business invariably eventually get to, the speed at which they realize they hate the government just varies. But they all eventually get to a point of being completely worn out from trying to dodge the feds, as anyone who’s watched the Sopranos or any other mafia movie could probably understand–dodging the law is exhausting. The only difference between big business and the mafia is that at least in theory the big businesses start out legitimate and it's only after they’ve gotten so large they become untouchable that the law no longer applies to them–or at least they think it shouldn’t. The only difference is that Tony Soprano, despite being a terrible person, still seems like someone I could probably get a beer with whereas Mark Zuckerberg seems like he would stare unblinkingly at anyone who attempted small talk with him.
ANYWAY, the rightward radicalization of Mark Zuckerberg, in three acts: act 1–the 2016 election. According to reporting from the New York Times, the Zuck didn’t take too kindly to coming under heightened government scrutiny after it was revealed that Facebook was used by foreign governments to influence the election, and the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal wherein peoples’ data was used without their consent to try to influence their votes. According to the New York Times, after enormous public pressure, “The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people and devoting enormous technological resources to fixing content moderation issues.” But then no one gave Mark the accolades he felt he deserved for doing all the hard hard thankless work of trying to make sure the company he created didn’t single handedly upend US democracy, notably finding that the investment was creating “diminishing returns.” Because, again, it’s always about the bottom line. And ego. BUt mostly the bottom line.
Act 2: making new friends. As someone who clearly probably struggles to make connections with humanoids, Mark Zuckerberg was easily pulled rightward when he found people that would tolerate him in the wonderful world of MMA, a testosterone fueled, often misogynistic and right leaning environment where, according to the New York Times, the Zuck formed a close connection with Dana White, the head of the “Ultimate Fighting Championship”, friend of Donald Trump, and now a newly named future member of the board of Meta. Zuck and White are so close that back in 2023 when Elon Musk publicly challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match on Twitter, Zuck texted Dana White directly and asked him if Elon was serious about wanting to fight him. White then acted as liaison between the two billionaires in an attempt to actually organize a literal cage match which like this is why men shouldn’t be allowed to run things what a stupid ego driven load of baloney. The cage match never happened of course but Zuckerberg’s affiliation with White and the world of “ultimate fighting” have continued to the point that Zuck was like GET THIS MAN ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS!!
Act 3: COVID. In a letter to Congress last year, the Zuck made clear that he was annoyed about the Biden administration putting pressure on him to regulate COVID-related misinformation on his platforms, saying that he should have pushed back more against the administration’s requests. COVID also saw a major boom in Zuck’s fortune and the growth of the company, followed by massive tech layoffs that I’m sure made the idea of cutting back on moderation more appealing–the less they moderate, the less money they have to spend on the moderation. Indeed in 2022 they began paring back moderation across the platforms, according to the NEw York TImes. And it wasn’t just COVID that had the government breathing down Zuckerberg’s neck. There was also the time in 2019 when Facebook was sued by the department of Housing and Urban Development for allowing racially discriminatory housing ads to run on its platform in clear and blatant violation of the Fair Housing Act. Then there was the tax evasion lawsuit oh and also the FTC filed a major lawsuit in 2020 against Meta for unfair trade practices also known as anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior. The lawsuit, headed by the chair of the FTC and channel favorite Lina Khan, is seeking to force Meta to sell some of its subsidiaries. That lawsuit is ongoing and likely another motivator behind Zuck’s quick move to bend the knee to Trump. Trump has announced he will be replacing Lina Khan with current FTC commissioner Andrew Ferguson, which “likely means that the commission will operate with a lighter touch when it comes to antitrust enforcement,” according to reporting from Time. More lenient FTC leadership, along with a sympathetic president in the White House, could mean that antitrust lawsuit against Meta goes away entirely or, at the very least, ends in barely a slap on the wrist, if that. And I’ve never seen the books over at Meta but I can venture a guess that even if advertisers run in the opposite direction of Meta, the same way they have with X, once it too becomes a swirling cesspool of right-wing bigotry, it is STILL better for Meta’s bottom line for it to be allowed to continue monopolizing any and all competition. That, and the cost savings of no longer having to moderate anything, combined with the Zuck’s personal right turn and hatred of government regulations meddling in his business and forcing him not to do illegal things, is likely enough to push him ever rightwards and more willing to do what it takes to win favor with Trump. And it seems to be working.
Zuck was invited to dine at Mar a Lago recently. Meta gave $1 million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund–inauguration funds are fun ways to get around campaign finance laws. He also promoted Joel Kaplan to the most senior policy role at Meta. Kaplan has deep ties to the Republican party and recently appeared on Fox & Friends to support the new Meta policy, with Trump responding that he found Kaplan’s appearance very “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” According to reporting from Semafor, Joel Kaplan is a longtime republican who once served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff under George W. Bush and has strongly criticized Meta’s censoring, complaining internally that it disproportionately discriminates against right-leaning voices. Kaplan replaced the former head of policy and lobbying at Meta, Nick Clegg, who, prior to working for Meta, used to run the UK’s Liberal Democrats party. Switching from that guy to a guy with deep Republican ties two weeks before Trump’s inauguration was clearly no accident and part of a larger scheme to appease Trump, a man who once threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg for his censorship activities.
And this latest move by Meta and its overall strategy to appease the incoming administration is also part of a larger picture wherein tech companies and their interactions with the government have come under intense scrutiny from both the left and the right. Ongoing discussions rage over how much responsibility tech firms have over the content placed on their platforms, over how much access the DOJ and police should have to the data social media platforms hold, and of course over censorship. Hell, JD Vance PRAISED Lina Khan for her work to dismantle big tech, long accused of excessive censorship against the right. Hating on big tech has, in recent years, been one of the only things the left and right can seem to agree on. But now the billionaires in charge are working to change that and have found far more leeway with the right, whose leadership is more swayed by ego stroking and far more inclined to distrust regulations and government encroachment on businesses. The missing piece of the puzzle is letting the right say whatever they want. Once that’s allowed, they can get back to hating government regulations together in harmony.
This is also why Jeff Bezos has been quick to kiss the ring as well. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer prize winning political cartoonist, just quit the Washington Post after 15 years because her cartoon depicting Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, and other billionaires bowing down to Trump wasn’t allowed to go to press. It was… censored, one might say. This after Bezos also pulled the publication’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The mainstream media is also a favorite punching bag of the right, and has been for decades, so whatever its owners can do to get on Trump’s good side could mean less scrutiny. Media conglomerates are also prime targets of criticism for increasing monopolization of the media industry. This is a classic example of the Streisand effect. The harder you work to suppress something, sometimes the more attention it gets. I would not be talking about or showing this political cartoon but for Bezo’s (alleged) refusal to print it–we don’t actually know if Bezos himself made the call of course.
But I’d like to zoom out to look at the bigger picture here, because big tech and the media bending over backwards to appease Trump and the right in its constant accusations of censorship and left-leaning bias is part of a larger rightward trend that has been going on for 50 years. Yes, we need to talk about the Powell Memo. You know, the POWELL MEMO? I made a whole episode about this already. Lewis Powell, right before becoming a Supreme Court justice in the 1970s, wrote a secret private memo for some business big wigs at the US Chamber of Commerce, one of whom happened to be neighbors with Powell. In that memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” Powell laid out the problems facing business in the immediately post-civil rights movement era of the United States. Basically, they were weak, they were being picked on, and the government had gotten out of hand and overly regulatory. And to gain back power, businesses needed to invest time and money into getting free market ideology, small government, and other right wing issues BACK in the mainstream and take back their power. To do this, they needed to invest in pushing Universities to include more right-wing thought, conservative think tanks to give those universities a place to send their students who can then publish papers legitimizing the right-wing thoughts, those papers can then be used by lobbyists to push right wing thoughts and those lobbyists will be bought and paid for by businesses and, just as importantly, businesses needed to infiltrate the media, who were unsympathetic to the big business cause and constantly MEDDLING. And on this last point, one of the major tactics big business employed as they enthusiastically took the Powell Memo plan and ran with it, was screaming whenever and wherever they could about left-wing bias in the media. Because now they were legitimizing their zany fringe ideas about government and economics through the creation of academic scholarship and publications and could then point to “mainstream media” and accuse them of bias for unfairly ignoring the work of their brilliant academics. And so, terrified at the prospect of being viewed as biased, news media began publishing more right-wing talking points and scholarship in order to be able to point and say SEE we’re not BIASED (God Forbid), because we’re willing to even publish these bat s*** crazy ideas. And thus began the rightward bend of every aspect of American life as businesses threw gobs of money at influencing politics, government, universities, the media, and our very culture, aided in the 80s by Ronald fuckin Reagan who ruined everything tshirts available at leejamillermerch dot com, whose deregulatory push allowed for greater monopolization of the media to where now we have a media landscape owned and dominated by billionaires who have inherited the pro-business apparatus built in the 70s which has now turned into a multi-headed monster thanks to Citizens United and the protection of money as speech in this country, which means any billionaire can pay for any political outcome they want.
And so targeting the media and now big tech with the accusation of bias and, as an extension, censorship, is a well-worn tactic by the right to control the narrative and legitimize the harmful ideas and ideologies that once were fringe not because there’s a leftist bias in universities and think tanks but because they’re bad ideas that usually aren’t backed by truth or science. Indeed much of the “research” that has come out of the right wing think tanks has been debunked over the years for bad methodology or fully made-up data. And it’s a well-worn tactic because it works, even though numerous studies have shown that the accusation that the media is biased is itself a lie. Similarly, the accusation that censorship online is biased has failed to be proven as well. According to the NYU Stern center for business and human rights, after extensive research they have found no evidence of anti-conservative bias online. And this last October, the journal Nature published a study that found that while conservatives and people who support Trump are more likely to have content removed or their accounts suspended by major social media platforms and their accounts sanctioned more often for sharing misinformation, that is not a product of a liberal-biased platform or moderators. The study showed that this held true–their content was removed or flagged more often for untrue or low-quality information–even when it is Republicans who are the ones determining what counts as “untrue” or “low quality.” Elon Musk’s own AI cited HIM as the greatest propagator of misinformation on his own platform.
I think this is all best summed up by a comment on a random right-wing typepad post from 2022 that has weirdly been making the rounds as a meme on social media lately but that is not satire, as far as I can tell, and is a genuine thought someone had. Username Right side rick says:
“Unfortunately, the problem with left-leaning media is they’re intrinsically more strict with their propaganda to only using verifiable sources so it’s really hard to poke holes in their ideology and arguments in comparison to a lot of quality rightwing content.
That makes attacking their points with fact checkers not very effective unless their fact checkers use misinformation tactics as well.
In essence people like us on the right have to work harder and more creatively to push our agenda as statistics and, unfortunately, official studies aren’t usually on our side.” Oop! Right side rick, I think you just said the quiet part out loud buddy. But good job identifying the problem.
On top of the fact that there is no left-wing conspiracy that is trying to silence right wingers on social media and it is actually their own lies and disinformation that is being removed at times by their own people, the other important point is that this type of content moderation on social media has been shown to be effective and positive, while twitter’s roll out of “community notes” that allow users to add context and flag posts has allowed right wing hate fueled speech to flourish on the platform, with Vox noting that studies show community notes to be slower and cover differing topics than professional fact-checking processes do, based on the knowledge and expertise, or lack thereof, of the site’s users. The slower pace of fact-checking through community notes means that a post can go viral long before it gets flagged for disinformation–a fact Elon Musk loves to exploit as he rails against Congressional actions and shares disinformation to his 200 million followers in the process.
And, according to Vox, “A USC study of English-language posts on X from January 2022 to June 2023 found that hate speech had increased 50 percent on the site in that time, with use of transphobic slurs increasing 260 percent.” This was of course the period after Elon bought twitter and began rolling back content moderation. Because Elon looooooves to tout himself as a free speech absolutist. Unless your free speech infringes his right to be free from ridicule or criticism. Then he’s alllllll about censorship.
And studies have shown that effective content moderation, especially of the most harmful content–the stuff that leads to real world violence–can actually prevent real world harm. That being said, community-led flagging efforts, the kinds like Community Notes on twitter or the type of moderation that happens on subreddit forums, does have a higher amount of trust from users–because they perceive it as other people like them in their community making the calls, instead of top-down fact-checking and moderating, which can more readily be seen as censorship. So I do think there is a larger conversation to be had about the role of content moderation on social media and how helpful it can be. There is a limit to its effectiveness, and there is a benefit to having open and robust discussions online. There’s a reason why I use a silly lil dolphin sound when I swear and am growing a Patreon community where I can say whatever I want without fear of having my videos demonetized or fully removed from the platform. Online censorship is a real thing and does lead to the removal or self-censoring of content. I like the IDEA of having the political content I post on Instagram be more visible.
However, as we’ve seen in practice on twitter since Elon bought it and on Reddit which is an excellent community resource but also has led to the radicalization of countless incels and men who hate women, to name just one example, the reality is that when online speech is allowed to flourish, it is the people who are already marginalized, who already live at the fringes of society–like the actual fringes not the “marginalization” white male conservatives believe they are suffering but you know black trans kids who are at higher likelihood of violence and self harm, for example. Those people are the ones who suffer the brunt of the abuses when platforms shirk any responsibility for moderation. And while the IDEA that my political content may become more visible under these new guidelines sounds nice, I’m skeptical that the reality will be anything other than the amplification of CERTAIN speech and CERTAIN voices above others, and the continued censorship of marginalized groups–like sex workers who use platforms to find safer work, or leftist organizers who build movements contrary to capitalism and everything the billionaires who own these platforms hold dear. SOOOMETHING tells me censorship of THOSE communities will continue and protections for other marginalized groups will go out the window. Because the reality is that the internet is still an incredibly new and novel thing especially in the legal world. We do not know how to regulate it, and discussions over free speech on the internet and how to regulate that speech are truly in their infancy both in society but also in legislation and in courts trying to fit the internet into already established legal principles. It doesn’t often fit cleanly, and we’re still trying to figure out what that means.
One gaping wide open gap in our understanding of the internet and its effects in the real world is our ability, or lack thereof, to connect online hate speech with real-world violence. Laws barring speech that imminently incites violence were written before anyone anywhere could write anything and it could instantly be seen by the literal entire world. The type of online speech that incites real world violence and chaos is different than the type we think of in the real world, like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Until the law has caught up with technology enough for us to be able to protect marginalized communities from the very real violence that online speech causes, the only protection available to them and to us is through content moderation, for better or for worse. So while conversations will continue over what TYPE of content moderation is best, I don’t think there is one clear answer because it is, overall, an imperfect answer to the lack of effective legal protections and guardrails around online speech. Until that happens, no matter the moderation level, it is the most marginalized among us who will continue to bear the brunt of the consequences of speech online.
Alright so what can we all do about this? Not much tangibly when it comes to what the Zuck can or cannot do at this point, especially with a favorable Trump in the White House. I think however the rightward turn of the media and now social media platforms is a good cautionary tale. Much of this has happened because of accusations from the right of leftist bias in media and on social media, despite, like I said, nothing to prove that the bias actually exists. Our collective terror, on the left but also in media generally, of the dreaded “biased” label is, I think, misplaced. As I’ve preached often, I don’t think humans are capable of being unbiased, and I think anyone trying to tell you that they are unbiased is full of s***–see, for example, all the openly conservative supreme court justices who speak at Heritage Foundation dinners and then turn around and say shame on you for claiming that they’re biased. They retain more power by making us believe they’re capable of being impartial arbiters of the law despite extensive evidence that Supreme Court justices and the opinions they write are heavily influenced by politics and social norms throughout history. Aiming for or seeking out unbiased sources of the ultimate truth is a fools errand, and giving anyone or any entity the coveted title of “unbiased” is giving them the power to state what the truth is and is not, and isn’t necessarily the true determination of who and what can be trusted. Maybe the media, social media, and consumers of all the above, should be less concerned about appearing unbiased and more concerned about owning up to their biases. I want every news publication to have a website heading that includes the names of people who own the business and their affiliations. I want to know the stories that get pitched and they decide not to cover and why. I want to know the political affiliations of the writers and editors. Disclose all of it. I don’t want “unbiased” labels, I want transparency. That gives me as a consumer the power to say alright I’m reading this article and I know that the publication is owned by so and so and that the writer is affiliated with such and such, and that is going to inform how I consume this piece of content. Maybe that’s wishful thinking but some of us have to dream of a better world!!
On the social media platforms themselves, we can follow and amplify the voices of marginalized people, especially when they post about the censorship they are experiencing. But also, above and beyond that, we need to make sure we are forming communities and making connections OFFLINE. In the REAL WORLD. And I promise I am not someone giving you this advice from my high horse, my literal entire business model relies on the continuation of YouTube’s existence, and I love my social media platforms and don’t love leaving my house so believe me when I say this is not an easy prospect for me. But it is so essential that we not be 100% reliant on companies owned by billionaires as our sole source of connection. Join an organization in your area that meets physically in person, whether that’s a political organization or an arts collective or a book club–or start your own with the community you already have. And support the creators you love outside of their social media presence–buy their art, buy their books, subscribe to their substack or email newsletters, go to their concerts, buy their albums, and join their Patreons.
And you can join me over on MY Patreon where I just launched the Why, America? Co-Learning Lab, a learning community having discussions and making connections, along with a monthly syllabus curated by me. All year we’ll be covering topics under the umbrella theme of “Eat the Rich: Building Solidarity in the New Gilded Age.” This month’s topic is all about learning from history to fight for the future. We’re looking at and discussing past movements to see where we can learn from history, because it does have a tendency to repeat itself. This is all hosted over on Patreon, which is linked down below. If you’re interested, please join us. I’ll also be hosting a special inauguration eve seance livestream, free and open to the public, on January 19th, sign up in the description to get more details.
Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Art, David, R_H, Tee, L’Etranger (Lukus), Joshua Cole, Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!
And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the from monday where I discussed the immigration debate tearing MAGA apart.
