Zuckerberg and Meta drop their misinformation charade

Trump's return to power offers a convenient cover for platform to drop fact-checking efforts.

- Dave Lee

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg's video announcement on Tuesday that the company would abandon its fact-checking efforts and loosen moderation marks a stunning reversal of years of promises regarding safety and misinformation.

As I watched it, I wondered whether Meta Platforms' PR team held off until Jan 7 because posting it on Jan 6 - the anniversary of the US Capitol insurrection - would have been too on the nose.

After promoting GOP-ally Joel Kaplan to head of policy and appointing Donald Trump pal Dana White to Meta's board, this next act to open the floodgates to hate speech means the Maga (Make America Great Again) storming of Menlo Park is just about complete.

Mr. Zuckerberg said he would work on issues of free speech with Trump - who, just four years ago, was considered too dangerous even to be a Meta user.

There is a view that Mr. Zuckerberg has shamefully abandoned his values in fear of Trump and in the hope that cosying up will be good for business. But it would be wrong to believe Mr. Zuckerberg ever truly held those values in the first place - and he's finally found the political cover needed to drop a years-long charade on safety and shed any pretence about being responsible for the accuracy of information that users see.

While it's hard to fathom when exactly America's culture wars began to take hold, it's much easier to pinpoint the moment when Meta - still called Facebook at the time - became one of its central characters. Immediately after the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Zuckerberg casually claimed it was "crazy" to think that "fake news" on the social network had played a role in swaying the election in Trump's favour. He was pilloried in the media.