In early 2017, Mark Zuckerberg was on what might be termed an “apology tour” of the United States. In the tumultuous few months since Donald Trump won his first presidential victory, the young chief executive of Facebook was reeling from his company’s part in serving US voters Russian disinformation, and widespread accusations that the social media platform had disseminated a vast spray of “fake news”. Fighting a rearguard action, Facebook announced changes to its algorithms, and a major initiative to include “third-party factcheckers” as part of the content moderation efforts.
Touring the country, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, stopped off in Selma, Alabama. They posed for a casual photo outside the offices of the iconic local paper, the Selma Times-Journal. Zuckerberg posted a heartfelt “thank you” to journalists “who work tirelessly and sometimes put their lives in danger to surface the truth. I don’t always agree with everything you say, but that’s how democracy is supposed to work.” The choice of the Times-Journal was freighted with significance. A paper that had campaigned against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and reported on the Montgomery to Selma civil rights marches in the 1960s was a pointed reminder of how the local press could provide a bulwark against fascism.
Two election cycles later, a transformation has taken place. With Facebook rebranded as Meta, Zuckerberg has become part of a major Silicon Valley realignment behind the second Trump presidency. This week, Zuckerberg announced the abrupt dismantling of the third-party factchecking network heralded in 2016, blaming the “bias” of the factcheckers themselves for “eroding trust”, and “governments and legacy media pushing to censor more and more”.
The language is straight from a Trump speech in 2022, where the next president talked about “Silicon Valley tyrants” colluding to “silence the American people”. The tirade, which threatened colleges and non-profits that investigate disinformation with defunding, was itself inspired by the release of the “Twitter files” by Elon Musk, who allowed a number of sympathetic journalists unfettered access to private internal documentation held by the company after he bought it. The “censorship cartel”, or tech platforms, academics and civil society groups studying and acting against the unfettered spread of disinformation, is the key focus of America’s top communications regulator Brendan Carr, the Trump appointment for chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Looking at Meta’s track record outside the US, it is possible to conclude that Zuckerberg has always cared more about his company’s proximity to power than he has proximity to truth. Lack of moderation resources and cultural attention in Myanmar arguably led in part to ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims; dictators like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used Facebook accounts and an army of trolls to undermine and harass legitimate journalism; journalists covering Gaza have found their material mysteriously “shadowbanned” on Meta’s other main conduit, Instagram (Meta claims it was a bug). In Canada, Facebook removed links from its pages to avoid a regulation that would have had the platform pay news organisations a licensing fee. As a result, the platform effectively bans legitimate news outlets at the expense of partisan campaigning. The rightwing Conservative party of Canada looks set for victory in elections this year, and a key part of leader Pierre Poilievre’s communications platform is defunding Canada’s English-language public broadcasting through cutting the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations’s budget.
The factchecking network itself was, from Facebook’s point of view, more of a useful public relations foil for possible regulation than a strategic long-term investment. Research showed it was applied in part in the US, though far more rigorously in Europe, as the Digital Services Act of 2022 regulates and fines very large online platforms that do not demonstrate adequate attention to preventing disinformation. Forcing a recession from trust and safety enforcement within large tech platforms is a key plank of Trump policy, inspired by Musk, in part as a reaction to European regulation.
Twitter was the first social media company to ban Trump after the 6 January 2021 insurrection, and was followed by Facebook and YouTube. Twitter was also the first social media platform in 2020 to flag Trump’s tweets for spreading Covid misinformation during the height of the pandemic. Now Musk is the owner of X, the rebranded Twitter, using his own platform as a bully pulpit against journalists, political opponents and overseas governments.
Musk is outrunning the long history of powerful media owners in terms of manipulation and influence, all without employing a single journalist. His relentless attacks on the UK Labour government and his promise to bankroll the Reform UK party to the tune of $100m, even if that now seems unlikely, dominate UK headlines, and threaten to subvert both politics and the media landscape. It is part of a broader campaign to fundamentally alter the world order with regards to rightwing authoritarianism, in part by removing and suppressing any accountability mechanisms. Even those as flimsy as Facebook’s factchecking efforts.
It is easy to overthink Zuckerberg’s pivot to Maga. In the past week he has swapped the former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, who was his head of global affairs, for the Republican Joel Kaplan, and added the Trumpy MMA president Dana White to his board. This is heavy and visible compliance ahead of time with the potential regulatory reforms threatened by the FCC.
Still, the effective political capture of information gatekeepers by the Trump administration poses significant policy questions for governments and institutions outside the US. It is easy to imagine a situation in Britain where a far-right government defunds the BBC, where the vast majority of institutional journalism is supported by overseas and right-leaning billionaires, and where the channels for independent distribution, such as the social platforms, are opaquely set against accountability of the wealthy and extreme.
Administrations like the current Labour government in the UK have a narrow window in which to act if they wish to resist this powerful trend. Reforming support for public media, digging deeper regulatory firebreaks through legislation and Ofcom, and providing new incentives and support for local and independent fact-based reporting are not far-fetched ideas.
The Biden administration in the US started down some of these paths by appointing anti-trust specialists to the FCC, encouraging bills that supported local news and setting up an ill-conceived initiative on fighting disinformation. But all such efforts have been washed away by a powerful tide of Maga media policy that is rooted in the more effective notion of quashing opposition and criminalising legitimate inquiry. As the epiphany of Mark Zuckerberg shows, in digital businesses political change can happen overnight, and without the vast majority of the public noticing the change in the weather. The long-term intentions and effects of small changes, however, can have long-lasting and global consequences.
