CAUGHT IN THE FACT
Billionaire tech bro Mark Zuckerberg is kissing Donald Trump’s ring like his life shareholder value depends on it. His latest sycophancy reveals a playbook that tech giants could use to appease Trump and keep their companies mega-profitable over the next four years.
- 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.”
Today’s announcement was the latest stop in Zuckerberg’s MAGApology tour, as the tech titan scrambles to preserve his company’s future — and his own.
- 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”?
PLASTIC WARS
A legal battle between Exxon Mobil and California is heating up.
On Monday, the oil giant filed a lawsuit against California Attorney General Rob Bonta and several environmental groups, accusing them of conspiring to defame the company and hurt its business. It stems from Bonta’s own lawsuit last year accusing Exxon Mobil of undertaking a “campaign of deception” when it encouraged consumers to buy more single-use plastics, claiming that they could be recycled.
Plastics are made from fossil fuels, and Bonta had bashed the company’s “advanced recycling” program that turns plastic into new products — including fuel. Environmental advocates say that that method is a distraction from actual solutions to solving the problem of plastic production and waste.
“Exxon Mobil has not engaged in a decades-long secret mission to brainwash or deceive the public,” the company wrote in its federal lawsuit.
The oil giant accused Bonta of making false statements about their recycling practices. But Exxon Mobil’s lawsuit is just “another attempt from Exxon Mobil to deflect attention from its own unlawful deception,” a spokesperson from California’s Department of Justice said in a statement.
What’s more, Bonta “looks forward to vigorously litigating” the case, the spokesperson added.
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NEWS NEWS NEWS
Donald Trump refused to rule out the use of military force or economic coercion to take control of Greenland and/or the Panama Canal. Starting 2025 out on the right foot!
Florida’s famously Trump-loving federal Judge Aileen Cannon temporarily blocked the Department of Justice from releasing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s draft report into the president-elect’s alleged mishandling of classified White House documents. Yes, it’s the same judge who dismissed Trump’s criminal case over classified documents.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there “isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” shunning Trump’s repeated talk about making the land of Tim Hortons into the 51st American state. Is Trudeau gonna get all feisty now that he’s resigning? I could get used to this.
Amazon is shelling out $40 million to license the upcoming documentary about Melania Trump. That’s about one-sixth the price that Jeff Bezos paid to buy the entire Washington Post — which, by total coincidence, Bezos blocked from endorsing Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, in the last election.
Longtime Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce, who Trump picked to be State Department spokesperson, repeatedly made fun of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), her soon-to-be boss, on social media years ago, referring to him with the nickname invented by Trump: “Little Marco.” Look, we’ve all done it.
The federal government opened an investigation today into 2.6 million Tesla cars after reports that a feature allowing owners to remotely move the vehicles led to crashes. The cars have failed to detect posts and parked cars, the government said. There’s no way a certain Tesla CEO being involved in the next administration could compromise this investigation, right?
A polar vortex that’s been sweeping across the U.S. this week could dump snow on southern parts of the country, including Texas and Oklahoma, in the coming days. To underscore how wild this is: The Kansas City area saw 11 inches of snow this week. Kansas usually gets 19 inches of snow a year.
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