On January 7, Mark Zuckebrerg made a not-so-stunning announcement.
The Meta CEO said that his company is ending its third-party fact-checking program, declaring that “experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives.” Instead, it’ll allow “more speech” and rely on a user-generated community notes feature like Elon Musk’s X already does.
This is a culmination of a yearslong rightward lurch away from the social media giant. Right-wing media has always thrived on Facebook, while left-wing critics have long criticized the company for everything from enabling genocide to allowing hate speech to thrive. But Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail have scolded Meta for kicking Donald Trump off its platform in the wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection and for heavily monitoring misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in recent years the company has taken exaggerated strides to demonstrate that they’re no lefties. Meta allowed Trump to rejoin its platforms in 2023, announced it was deprioritizing political content across Instagram and Threads, and this week made former Bush White House official Joel Kaplan its global affairs chief. Oh, and Meta gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee.
“This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression,” Kaplan told Fox News in an interview. “What we’re doing is we’re getting back to our roots and free expression.”
With Trump assuming the presidency on January 20, Meta knows it needs to play nice with the administration. Trump previously claimed that Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and wrote that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he tried it again.
But the move to end Meta’s fact-checking program is just as much a reflection of the current state of its main platform, Facebook, than a political offering to the party in power. I mean, have you seen Facebook lately?
Take a spin around Facebook and you’ll see baby announcements, graduations, and birthday messages. But you’ll also see a glut of artificial intelligence-generated “slop” images. My Facebook feed doesn’t have political ruminations—it doesn’t have anything political at all. There’s scant updates from any news organizations, name-brand influencers, or even friends posting about what’s going on in the world. Irrelevant advertisements fill my feed alongside groups I do not follow, and content that seems designed to evoke shock and awe from someone who has never encountered the internet before.
There’s a nautical-themed bathroom that’s so obviously made with AI that the tiles on the floor are unevenly curved. There’s a nostalgia post from a Facebook group called “I grew up in New York” (I didn’t). And there’s a supposedly funny image from a page called “Bussin’ With The Boys” that says “Never forget when Jared Goff wore his own jersey to a bar when he was a rookie.” Not only did I see this recycled post on Twitter a week ago, but it’s false. The quarterback was at a Make-a-Wish event. The Facebook fact-checkers won’t have a chance at that one, but maybe an army of community notes commenters will handle it. (That’s unlikely.)
The reality is that, yes, Meta is playing nice with Trump and Co. But Facebook’s current status is so painfully dumbed-down, ad-ridden, and slop-filled that it’s perhaps a move for the best. Facebook is unhealthy beyond repair. We should stop pretending that it’s anything but a dead platform.
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