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Technogarchy Goes to Washington

The “Muskification” of Meta and the Free Speech, Fact-Checking Charade

Billionaire tech owners who align themselves with whatever administration occupies the White House undermine democracy by threatening a dangerous consolidation of private and public power.

Project Censured, By Mischa Geracoulis and Mickey Huff, February 20, 2025

On January 7, 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on “Fox & Friends” that the recent US elections point toward the need to prioritize free speech, proclaiming that Meta’s fact-checkers have been too politically biased.

Meta’s new global policy chief, former deputy chief-of-staff in the George W. Bush White House and energy lobbyist, Joel Kaplan, lauded Meta for returning to its free expression roots. No stranger to Meta, during Trump’s first reign, the GOP operative oversaw changes to Facebook’s algorithm to promote right-wing content and advocated against restricting racially incendiary and conservative content.

The Biden Administration also had influence over Meta’s algorithms, as Zuckerberg revealed to Joe Rogan and the House Judiciary Committee. According to Zuckerberg, under the guise of fact-checking, Facebook was pressured to “moderate” (ie. censor) certain information, too, especially around issues like the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 origin, and pandemic policies (including satire and humorous posts). In a recent letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg lamented, “I believe the government was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” He also noted that tech companies should not cave to political pressures in either direction.

Zuckerberg’s statements and revelations to Rogan, however, contradict that Meta—and other social media platforms, as documented by the Twitter Files—actually do fall in line with the reigning political party. This is deeply problematic in both aforementioned examples as it acts to further erode public trust. Time will tell, but if past is prologue, it appears the opposite has been the trend with Big Tech kowtowing to the political establishment.

Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network and former PolitiFact editor-in-chief, who also served on Facebook’s original fact-checking team, told Poynter that Meta’s 180-degree turn on fact-checking appears as though Zuckerberg is seeking to please Trump and, once again, to conform with the goals of the right………………………………..

Following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, slated to co-chair the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Zuckerberg and other Big Tech CEOs made pre-inauguration pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration. Taking a cue from the Silicon Valley CEOs, even New York City mayor Eric Adams turned up at Mar-a-Lago just days before the inauguration, presumably hoping to dodge 2024 corruption charges for accepting bribes from and conspiring with the Turkish government.

The Billionaire Row Big Tech CEOs who attended Trump’s inauguration, including Musk, Zuckerberg, Amazon/Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, had “better seats than most of the cabinet members.” The opulent optics of that inaugural spectacle did not come about by accident. They were crafted to convey a clear message about who was lining up to support the new Trump administration, with Big Tech’s oligarchs and the digital information interests they represent positioned at the forefront. The role these entities play moving forward should be carefully scrutinized, especially around issues of narrative control, agenda setting, and censorship in service of Trump and the MAGA GOP……………………………………………………………………………………….

The end of DEI could lead to real-life harms

Meta joins the growing list of companies—including Target, McDonald’s, Walmart, Boeing, Molson Coors, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, and Amazon—that are ending or scaling back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is “culturally neutered” and could do with more masculine energy and aggression. Statistics show, nevertheless, that women comprise just 25 to 35 percent of tech jobs in the US, and only 11 percent hold executive positions. Juliet A. Williams, gender studies professor and Social Science Interdepartmental Program chair at UCLA, asserts that the term “neutered” is gendered dog whistling that promotes gender traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

St. John’s University law professor Kate Klonick told The Intercept, “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Director General Thibaut Bruttin has stated the “‘Muskification’ of the Meta group’s platforms obeys a political strategy that allows private sector interests to prevail over the need for a public conversation based on facts.” Signaling hostility toward journalism, Meta is accentuating its disengagement from the universal right to access reliable news and information, “reinforcing a model based on virality, at the risk of amplifying hate speech, manipulation and false information,” Bruttin wrote.

……………………………………………………………..The Technogarchy displaces democracy and journalism

The new changes will also permit users to post more acerbic criticism of ethnicity and nationality, which has been at issue in places such as the Philippines and Myanmar and that RSF finds troubling. At present, Meta’s changes only apply to its users in the United States, but RSF warned that new US policies might foreshadow “a global strategy of marginalizing journalism and its actors in the name of a freedom of expression perverted to serve ideological interests.”

Amnesty International reported that in 2017, Facebook’s algorithms “substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people.” How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Philippine journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s 2022 book, documents Facebook’s role in disseminating dangerous disinformation during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential campaign and election, which was “accomplished with a loyal ‘troll army’ that boosted pro-Duterte narratives on social media, while smashing down opposition.”

Ressa warns that Meta’s end to fact-checking and DEI policies come down to safety issues. A “world without facts” becomes “a world that’s right for a dictator.” Ressa is right to be concerned. However, there is an elitist assumption at play here, based on tacit faith in those fact-checkers as infallible, unbiased judges of complex, charged issues such as DEI policy or Russiagate. Ascribing to any individual or group a monopoly on the truth stifles legitimate debate about such controversial issues. Despite its best intentions, a protectionist approach to fact-checking may inadvertently undermine public trust when members of the public discover that fact-checking organizations have stifled fact-based perspectives deemed to be unpalatable. More broadly, as suggested previously, this furthers the erosion of public trust especially in government institutions and the Fourth Estate, both of which are near or at record-low approval ratings, according to the Pew Research Center.

Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar and author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East (2022), views Zuckerberg’s changes as indicative of the U.S’s move toward authoritarianism, which thrives in an environment of disinformation and a manufactured “war against reality.” Getting rid of fact-checkers, Jones told Democracy Now!, signals acquiesce to Trump’s demands, perpetuates the right-wing notion that the United States suffers from a crisis of censorship, and promotes what Jones has elsewhere called “institutionalized violence by algorithm.”

Vaidhyanathan sees it differently because, according to him, in the United States, the government worships corporations. Zuckerberg is not bowing to Trump, but the other way around, Vaidhyanathan told Democracy Now!. “Zuckerberg always gets what he wants out of the United States government,” Vaidhyanathan asserted, adding that, now, Zuckerberg “sees an opportunity to get even more of what he wants out of the Trump administration.”…………………………………………………….

The evergreen need for independent journalism and critical media literacy

Meta’s changes ultimately point to a more productive solution—the evergreen necessity of independent media and critical media literacy. Crowdsourced content, pundit-driven infotainment, and AI can never replace research, investigative journalism founded on ethical reporting practices, and critical thinking skills. It’s only been since 2016 that fact-checking, under the purview of Big Tech, became an entity separate from the job of journalism, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi has noted. That’s a problem best addressed by educators and journalists, not outsourced to Big Tech.

Social media, even in the presence of fact-checkers, was never, and can never, serve as a replacement for the work of an independent free press— one that not only checks facts, but checks the power of Big Tech, government, and the corporate media, holding them accountable to the public.  https://www.projectcensored.org/technogarchy-washington-muskification-meta/

February 25, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA