Mark Zuckerberg is turning his back on the media

There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg did not see mass media as an enemy. He let me into his house, which was a man carrying news cards. In April 2018, I went there to hear his plans to do the right thing. It was part of the many years I spent in Facebook to write a book. Over the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company has come under fire for failing to crack down on hate speech and hate speech. Now the young entrepreneur had a plan to deal with this.

Part of the answer, he told me, it was a lot to control. They hire more people to view posts, even if it costs Facebook a lot of money. They will also expand efforts to use artificial intelligence to quickly remove harmful content. “It’s no longer enough to give people the tools to say what they want and just let our team explain it to them and try to respond after it happens,” he told me as we sat in his sunroom. “We’ve got to get into it a lot and just play the hard part.” He admitted that he was slow to realize the extent of the damage done by the toxic tools on Facebook, but he is now committed to fixing the problem, even if it takes years. He told me: “I think we are doing the right thing, we should have done it sooner.”

Seven years later, Zuckerberg no longer thinks moderation is the right thing to do. In A five-minute reelhe showed what he did to help as a cave of grief in the Covid government and other studies. It has announced that it will stop censoring content – no more speedy downloads and downloads of fake news and hate speech – and the end of a monitoring program aimed at countering falsehoods spread on its platforms. Fact-checking and reliable sources may be replaced by “group posts,” a crowdsourcing method in which users provide alternative opinions about the veracity of articles. This method is what he told me in 2018 that he “doesn’t fit.” Although he admits that now his reforms will allow “a lot of bad things,” he says that in 2025 it is necessary for “liberal speech” to improve.

The policy change was one of several signs that, whether Zuckerberg intended to do it all along, Meta is positioning itself in line with the Trump administration. You’ve heard the litany, which has become a meme itself. Meta promoted its chief executive, former GOP operative Joel Kaplan, to head of international affairs; he immediately appeared on Fox News (and only Fox News) to explain the new facts. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta will move staff who write and review content from California to Texas, “to help eliminate concerns that racist employees are drying up information.” He ended DEI’s Meta program. (Where is Sheryl Sandberg, who was so proud of Meta’s various works. Sheryl? Sheryl?) and Meta changed some of its service features to allow users bringing down LGBTQ people.

Now that it’s been a week since Meta turned-and my first take about Zuckerberg’s speech-I am very impressed by one thing: He seems to have lowered the popular practice of journalism, showing that it is no better than the unreported information from the audience, influencers, and countless people on his platforms. This was explained in his Reel where he repeatedly used the term “media heritage” as a threat: a force that, in his view, promotes control and inhibits freedom. All this time I was thinking differently!

Confirmation of its revised integrity comes from a shift in fact-finding to group writing. It’s true that the fact-checking process wasn’t perfect—in part because Zuckerberg didn’t defend critics when unmotivated critics accused them of racism. It’s also reasonable to expect community posts to be a helpful indicator that a post might be fake. But the power of argument fails when the participants in the discussion reject the idea that arguments can be resolved by convincing evidence. That’s the big difference between fact-checking – which Zuckerberg has removed – and the community’s posts he’s following. The worldview assumes that facts, arrived at through research, talking to people, and sometimes even believing your own eyes, can be proven. The trick is to recognize the authorities who have gained the trust of the people by following the truth. Community posts receive some suggestions – but the judgment of which ones are trustworthy is up to you. There is something to the canard that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if the facts cannot refute the easily refuted flapdoodle, we are in the suicidal quicksand of babel.

That’s the world that Donald Trump, Zuckerberg’s new role model, eagerly sought to discover. 60 minutes journalist Leslie Stahl he once asked Trump why did they insult journalists who were just doing their job. “Do you know why I do this?” He replied. “I do this to humiliate you all and humiliate you all so when you write bad stories about me, no one will believe it.” In 2021, Trump it revealed his motive for profit is to attack the truth. “If you say enough and keep saying it, they will start to believe,” he said at the meeting. The bottom line is that if social media promotes enough falsehoods, people will believe them. Especially when established authorities are being mocked and mocked.