CAUGHT IN THE FACT

• The internet woke up this morning to a cursed video of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — decked out in a gold chain, a $900,000 watch that looks like it was crafted in the distant future, a trendy oversized black t-shirt and curly locks — in short, doing his best impression of a normal Earth person. He proudly announced: Facebook and Instagram don’t need fact-checkers anymore! Free speech: Solved! Zuck said his fact-checking team had occasionally made errors, and cited President-elect Donald Trump’s victory as rationale for the change. But don’t be fooled. If this seems like a nakedly political attempt to appease Trump, who has made Facebook his arch enemy over the past decade… that’s because it is.

• “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.” He added: “Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.” Are fact-checkers too politically biased, or are there just certain politicians from one particular party that lie very often?

• Facebook and Instagram will instead adopt a feature similar to X’s community notes. Users will be allowed to add context to posts, which are then rated as helpful or not by a range of users, with the intention of settling on an unbiased fact-check. The community notes feature has been praised as a clever practice by the Elon Musk-appointed goons at X (formerly Twitter), but also drawn criticism from experts who say the fact-checks are often insufficient.

• The company also updated its hateful conduct policy, in a change that will essentially allow people to say more offensive things. Under the updated guidelines, users can apparently now label “women as household objects or property,” according to a section of prohibited speech that was scrapped.

• MAGAworld is giddy about the changes. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, forever the MAGA firebreather, posted: “So with META going the way of community notes we should probably take over that community too, no?”

• Shifting from fact-checking to community notes, which empowers users to moderate content in a similar way that Wikipedia does, isn’t inherently a bad idea, experts say. But there’s a catch. Users are only as well-informed as the info they have access to, “and Meta has pulled back on lifting up reliable news reporting, and it’s also banned access to news reporting altogether in some places,” Kate Ruane, an expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told What A Day. “There’s a real risk that the communities that Meta is turning to and trusting will lack access to reliable sources.”

• Last month, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee (as have many other billionaires). In November, Zuckerberg dined with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago. Yesterday, Meta named UFC macho man Dana White, a Trump loyalist, to its board of directors. Last week, it also named Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who had once been considered for a Trump administration job, to be its chief global affairs officer. What’s more, Meta gave the scoop of today’s news to Fox & Friends, one of Trump’s favorite shows.

• All this pro-Trump diplomacy may even be an attempt to alleviate Meta’s legal woes. In April, the company will face an antitrust trial, in which the federal government accused Meta of buying Instagram and Whatsapp in an attempt to crush other social media competition. Ironically, the case was filed during the Trump administration and refined during the Biden administration. By showing his unabashed loyalty to Trump this time around, Zuckerberg could potentially save his company from being broken up. Also keep in mind: Trump threatened the Meta CEO with “life in prison” last August after accusing the tech bro of plotting against him in the 2020 election. So, yeah: Zuck has plenty of reasons to suck up to the guy.

• Trump himself said that his threats against Meta “probably” prompted Zuckerberg to pull the fact-checkers, and noted approvingly that he heard the news from Fox & Friends. “I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump told reporters, referring to Meta. He praised Zuckerberg, too: “The man was very impressive.”

Elon Musk won Donald Trump’s heart by handing over his checkbook and transforming X into a cesspool ripe for misinformation and far-right lunacy. Mark Zuckerberg, apparently, got the memo. Who knows, maybe he’ll become the “second buddy”?

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