The Propaganda Wars Are in Full Swing

Following a presidential election won by the candidate who lied the most, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced it would stop fact-checking. 

Following a presidential election won on the back of ads attacking trans people, Meta announced it would end diversity-hiring initiatives, yanked queer-friendly graphics from its apps, and removed protections for LGBTQ people by radically changing its hate-speech policy. 

Following a presidential election won by the candidate who promised to jail Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg gave Donald Trump millions of dollars, paid homage to him at his Florida estate, and appointed one of Trump’s close friends to his corporate board. 

This is how tech companies are capitulating in advance to Trump’s authoritarian agenda, and destroying valuable online communities in the process. They’re knuckling under his bullying over conservatives being “censored” and “silenced.” They’re pledging themselves to Trump’s cause before he even demands their loyalty.

They’re ripping down any infrastructure of user safety, inclusivity, or accommodation and making thousands of people unwelcome in the spaces they built. They’re making it harder for people to find their friends and colleagues online, harder to exchange reliable information, and harder to debunk even the most obvious lies. 

Trump wasn’t even in power when Zuckerberg began his obsequious demonstrations of fealty. He made a video announcing that Meta was severing its relationships with third party fact-checkers who did things like identify hoax content (particularly Covid conspiracy theories and GOP election denial) and rate content as true or false. 

Instead, users will be encouraged to add “community notes” to posts and rate those up or down to indicate reliability, which makes the question of fact or fiction a pure popularity contest. Users with an agenda, like MAGA loyalists, will have far more motivation to promote fake content inflaming people’s emotion on immigration, for example.

GOP operatives already invest heavily in right-wing content, pushing bigoted memes in targeted ads for which they pay millions. They own publishing houses, networks of websites that push inflammatory stories onto social media, and Fox News, a 24-hour propaganda television network masquerading as mainstream journalism. They also own several broadcast outlets, like OAN and Newsmax, that don’t bother pretending.

Zuckerberg’s moves will only make their job easier—and a lot cheaper. 

The changes come at a time when X has become a factory for Trump supporters to pump out false info. During moments of crisis, like during Hurricane Milton or the ongoing fires in Los Angeles, X users, egged on by owner Elon Musk—Trump’s single largest re-election donor—posted conspiracy after conspiracy.

Musk amplified those posts, verifying and boosting any user willing to give him money for a blue check signifying authenticity, even if those accounts were run by proud Nazi sympathizers. He reposted anti-Semitic content and called it “the actual truth.” He ran with baseless GOP claims of voter fraud, accused immigrants of voting illegally, and shared conspiracies that the presidential debate was “rigged” against Trump.

With Zuckerberg following suit, social media is now in precipitous decline as a place to find useful information just when Americans need it most. And it’s a direct attack on the kinds of communities Trump and the GOP are already targeting: rural towns in news deserts, queer people and people of color (many of whom were early adopters of social channels).

Just as X was once a place to share real-time information about protests and disasters, Facebook was a bastion of political and community organizing. The site’s groups were fertile ground to recruit supporters and build power for the marginalized who could not count on support or even fair coverage from the mainstream press.

Zuckerberg, and tech CEOs like him, are aided and abetted by credulous reporters and editors who present the every utterance of a billionaire executive without pushback or question. In September, the New York Times let Zuckerberg declare he was “done with politics” and had no intention of taking sides in the upcoming election. 

Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly expressed regret around some of his political activity in a letter to Congress. He said that in 2021, the Biden administration “pressured” Meta into censoring more Covid-19 content than Mr. Zuckerberg felt comfortable with. And he said he would not repeat the contributions he made in 2020 to support electoral infrastructure because the gifts made him appear not “neutral.”

Zuckerberg had no problem, a few weeks later, kicking a cool million into Donald Trump’s second inauguration fund. Fellow CEOs Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, among others, followed suit. They couched these gifts in language about working with the incoming administration and “turning the page” to focus on the future, but when outgoing President Joe Biden came into office, Meta and OpenAI contributed absolutely nothing. Amazon offered a paltry $276,000. 

After that, Meta removed queer-friendly themes from its Messenger app, announced an end to diversity hiring initiatives, killed trans-friendly policies like keeping tampons in all employee bathrooms, and changed its hate speech policy to allow users to refer to LGBTQ people as, among other things, “mentally ill.” Zuckerberg went on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show to belligerently defend all of this, saying content moderation amounted to “censorship” and made the company “culturally neutered.”

None of this moved the Times to retract its “done with politics” piece, instead reporting on Zuckerberg’s “political evolution”: 

Mr. Zuckerberg has told executives close to him that he is comfortable with the new direction of his company. He sees his most recent steps as a return to his original thinking on free speech and free expression, with Meta limiting its monitoring and controlling of content, said two Meta executives who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg in the last week.

As news broke of Meta’s intention to give Trump everything he wanted, people began talking about Meta alternatives. Facebook, Threads, and Instagram already had user experience problems, choked with ads and “suggested posts” that platformed irrelevant or hateful content. When Elon Musk began destroying X, users moved to BlueSky, which lets you block people completely and only shows you content you want to follow. 

And while it’s tempting to say good riddance and join the flight, before we go, we should acknowledge the loss of communities built within social media online. 

In the past decade and a half, social channels became a place for people to share information with family and friends, and not just silly pictures of the grandchildren, either. They were where state and local government agencies shared safety bulletins in emergencies. They were where people organized food and clothing drives for those in need, where fundraisers got crucial donations for their causes, where people gathered to comfort one another in misery and celebrate in triumph. They may have always been run by suspect characters, but those who used those spaces were granted a certain amount of autonomy and freedom within them.

Now all of that is being burned to the ground in the name of appeasing Trump, in hopes Trump will respond with more deregulation, more tax cuts, and more belligerent bellowing about stamping out kindness in the name of “free speech.” In Facebook’s case, unpopular products and reduced engagement will only strengthen Meta’s loyalty to right-wing patrons who continue to use their services. 

It’s hard not to be demoralized watching communities that mattered to you made inhospitable on purpose to make the kind of political point Zuckerberg once said he was done with.