The Overdue End of Fact-Checkocracy
Or: How Mark Zuckerberg Became a Real Boy
“Words do not constitute an overt act; they remain only in idea. When considered by themselves, they have generally no determinate signification; for this depends on the tone in which they are uttered. It often happens that in repeating the same words they have not the same meaning; this depends on their connection with other things, and sometimes more is signified by silence than by any expression whatever. Since there can be nothing so equivocal and ambiguous as all this, how is it possible to convert it into a crime of high treason? Wherever this law is established, there is an end not only to liberty, but even of its very shadow.”
- Montesquieu [The Spirit of the Laws, I.XII.12]
Note: Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with Joe Rogan was released while I was working on this article, and he directly stated some of my best insights into his thinking. I have included some clips, but did not watch the whole interview.
On Tuesday, January 7th, Mark Zuckerberg, who was long considered to be the American plutocrat most likely to be an android in a skinsuit, made a surprise announcement: Facebook would be ending its partnerships with fact-checkers and making significant changes to its policies regarding hate speech and political discourse in general. In some ways, the announcement wasn’t that surprising, as the signs had been building up for some time. Both on a personal and professional level, Zuckerberg has gone through many changes reflecting, and shaping, the recent course of American life. He had already indicated that he is angry that going along with the government- especially regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story- made him look like a bitch and damaged his company and personal brand. Now, he claims that Facebook will be returning to its free speech roots and implementing community notes like on X. The media and libs are in meltdown mode about the dangers of allowing relatively free discourse on a website widely used by the general public. This is one of the biggest “We are so back!” moments yet. Meta, as Facebook’s parent company is officially known, is one of the world’s largest corporations and a major funder of these fact-checkers. Whereas Musk is a sort of hated gadfly acting crazy and discrediting himself all the time, Facebook going in this direction is likely to impact the entire industry’s standards. Anyway, you should watch his video for yourself if you haven’t yet, and then I will start from the beginning:
I’ve been a Facebook user for, incredibly, 20 years now, and the entire history merits a review to understand the Zuckerberg and Facebook of today.
When Zuckerberg started what was then called TheFacebook at the beginning of 2004 it was just for students at Harvard to connect with each other and plan study sessions and group projects and that sort of thing. Naturally, college students were more interested in screwing around and trying to meet people to bang. It rapidly expanded to other universities- I got it at my state university at the end of 2004. At the time you needed a university email, and it had a space to input your class schedule, which most people did. In fact, when I changed universities at the end of 2005 it took weeks to transfer your Facebook account to a new university- what was then your “social network”- causing me to create a new account. Features were very rudimentary, primarily just looking at profiles and chat groups, many of which were silly and were little more than a joke title. The site ended up experiencing incredibly rapid growth and in no time was open to everyone and all of our parents were on it, as well as our grandparents, crazy aunts and uncles, and everyone else. Over time, the “wall” and newsfeed features came to life and the email-type messaging turned into a full instant messaging app. It is hard to remember when and how everything changed, but suffice to say most key features such as allowing more than one picture were early, whereas others, like replying to comments, were surprisingly late.
Facebook has never worked well. You may remember when we were kids we didn’t imagine all the innovations that would come in computers, but we all figured that when we were adults they would work well. This of course never happened, because the ethos of Silicon Valley is rapid and irresponsible innovation. There are upsides to this competitive environment but they have constantly added new features keeping everything half broken all the time. Admittedly, the never-ending threats from viruses and hackers and the like gives some justification for constant change. Regardless, Facebook has been one of the worst offenders of never having a working product. Mark Zuckerberg has never seemed like a good CEO, nor like someone with the ruthless ambition to get himself in that position. He has also never seemed to understand what he has with the company, at least not in the same way that long-time heavy users like myself do. However, it was a product whose time has come and he happened to get the niche and Facebook became irreplaceable. Besides sites like Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok, which provide fundamentally different services, all the social media competition has fallen by the wayside [remember Google’s “Facebook killer?” I can’t even think of what it was called.] Still, in an antitrust sense it should be noted that Facebook has nothing close to a monopoly on “social media” unless it is very narrowly defined to mean “services exactly like Facebook.”
The early and innocent era of Facebook went on for some time. Its influence on the general public became quite large. Twitter was preferred by the media and newsmakers, but the common people used Facebook. I myself didn’t get a Twitter account until I started this Substack at the beginning of 2022 and rarely wanted to use it, though I checked on news stories there occasionally [not having an account worked out well, as I would have been in terrible standing from the covid era when I wanted to promote my work.] It perhaps merits mentioning that for years my main use of Twitter was verifying if Donald Trump really tweeted that.
In 2008 when Obama won the Presidency, driven in large part by a wave of support from young people on Facebook, the liberals in the media gushed about how great Facebook was for our democracy:
Of course, these same people also loved the “Arab Spring.” Facebook was the harbinger of a new era where totalitarianism would fall by the wayside in the face of the public’s ability to communicate.
I used Facebook very heavily throughout this period, generally sharing perhaps 10-15 news articles with commentary every morning. People would commonly tell me I was one of their main news sources, though I was simply doing my own aggregation. This slowly got suppressed over time, with Facebook doing things like encouraging an algorithm for your newsfeed and making it so articles shared without commentary [that last one was a serious blow to the site as a place to share information.]
With Trump’s victory, suddenly Facebook impacting our democracy was a nefarious Russian disinformation plot and kids posting frog memes were a dangerous Fifth Column. No one bothered to square this with believing Facebook had renewed our democracy 8 years earlier when they liked the election results. Up to that point, within the realm of reasonable behavior, it was a pretty free environment. As has been observed by many, it wasn’t Trump who tried to end democracy, it was the response to him by deranged lunatics unwilling to accept the many reasons for their defeat. Democrats began to threaten social media companies with the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which explicitly protects such internet services from being considered a “publisher” of content that users post on their sites. Without this liability protection it is more or less impossible for such companies to operate.
Threats, the social panic, and constant news stories and investigations caused Facebook to try to “get ahead” of the issue. Zuckerberg himself has now acknowledged that the media more or less sold him on the “fake news” narrative. This is when we first started getting the fact-checks. Of course, there has always been fact-checking on the internet, but it was primarily the realm of news articles discussing claims made during Presidential debates and that sort of thing. The beginning of “fact-check” boxes forced under your posts was innocuous in theory but nefarious in practice, especially as it was based on the lie that “misinformation” was the reason people voted for Donald Trump. That fiction was invented solely to shift blame from our failed ruling class which refuses to even try to govern well, and which was a dangerous wounded beast after Trump’s victory. [We could argue all day about if Trump is a threat to “the establishment” but it is undeniable that a lot of people in positions of power were very upset about his election in 2016.] They demanded we believe that .0001% of Facebook content being Russian purchased sponsored posts about random issues such as black liberation was the real story of Trump’s victory.
In 2018, Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was more or less just a company using harvested data to sell ads [literally Facebook’s business model, by the way, though the third party app broke whatever rules.] Now, going before Congress should be intimidating, but is usually such a clown show that you feel more embarrassed for the person being questioned because it is below his dignity to speak to these morons. In Zuckerberg’s case he was made to live every millennial’s worst nightmare: explaining how the internet works to the nation’s elderly.
It was also around this time that Zuckerberg became his most robotic, and the Zuckerberg-as-android meme really took off.
Throughout the Trump Administration the screws turned evermore tightly with pressure from the media, intelligence agencies, and Facebook’s own left wing employees. Censorship was the order of the day. “Fact-checkers” would save our troubled democracy from “bad actors” online. I don’t think I even got a ban on Facebook until 2019, though later, for a time, I had 4 accounts juggling 30 day bans [the highest level besides permanent deletion.] As covid retardation took off, I became much more aggressive on the internet. There was no talking sense to people so it was best to call someone a retard and move on with your day, which you could get away with sometimes- “retard” was never a consistent ban for me. However, as we all know, a huge amount of content became verboten, such as “deadnaming,” which is to say using the real name of a trans person. “White trash” was one auto-ban phrase it was easy to forget you couldn’t say- but in Facebook’s defense it’s because they were trying to make an even playing field and you couldn’t say things like that about any other race. Many bans were outright silly, such as my alt account Deeandra [named after my cat] getting a ban for “adult solicitation” after I shared an article about an internet outage in India with the comment “Who will I show my bobs and vagene to now?”1 Another time I got a ban for suggesting that using politicians to follow the Aztec ritual of sacrificing people in a volcano couldn’t possibly make things worse. The funniest example of the auto-censors misfiring was not on Facebook but was on Youtube, where chess videos kept getting banned because of things you would say about black and white pieces when describing chess [“white knight kills black pawn” does sound bad if you’re a computer program designed to detect racism.] The entire corporate internet was censorship crazy.
Regarding more explicit political censorship, before the 2020 election the FBI had given Facebook strong “warnings” about a Russian disinformation operation. This led to Facebook suppressing the true Hunter Biden laptop story, though not nearly as badly as Twitter did at the time, where you couldn’t even share a link in direct messages and The New York Post was banned entirely. Still, at this point Facebook had increasingly forced people into algorithms for their content, so what it did with your reach was profound2. One of my friends from growing up whom I almost never interacted with “liked” several of my posts at once and I inquired about why this was the case, that every few months she likes 10 of my posts. She told me that Facebook never shows her my content, but she went to my page looking for information about Hunter Biden’s laptop [which I had not heavily posted about, but indeed she was able to find it there.] Facebook was also convinced to not let people talk about a lab-leak as the source of covid. You all understand what we learned from “The Twitter Files” and how censorship-obsessed the Biden Administration was. It was the same for Facebook, we just got relatively less information, though plenty has come out.
Of all that happened, I think it is more than anything the Hunter Biden laptop and the lab leak which made Zuckerberg feel that the government had made him look like a bitch. In the interview with Joe Rogan that came out as I was working on this article, Zuckerberg confirms that the Biden Administration harangued his business to take down content well past what he was willing to comply with, and he obviously began to assume malice:
It’s hard to not get the feeling like he is describing his experience of surviving a totalitarian regime.
At some point in this Facebook became an absolute wasteland. They intentionally de-prioritized political content. Allowed conversation was very narrow. You could get zucc’d, the slang term for a Facebook ban or other censorship, so easily. They had tried to drive people into groups- behind closed doors in essence- if they wanted to discuss controversial matters, essentially ceding Facebook as the “public square.” Posting was reduced across the board as people stopped using the site, at least authentic posts you would want to see. By the time Musk took over Twitter, under a year after I began using it, Facebook was a shell of its former self. What good content there is on Facebook is largely from Twitter and TikTok, whereas on Twitter, Facebook posts usually only get shared to laugh at boomerposting, and even that is uncommon. My page for this Substack only has 88 followers after almost three years, despite that I have over 500 friends and have promoted it repeatedly. Strangely, the only way to make a page grow is to stop using it, and then Facebook will recommend it as it has done nothing to upset their algorithm. Substantial portions of the total content is AI generated, and it is often more humorous than any of the real content, though it’s usually not clear what the economics of the bot pages are. Other times all the responses are also AI. Facebook today is the dead Internet theory proven. Here is one example of modern Facebook content:
It happens to constantly show me American Indian related pages, especially ones related to activism or standing up to the white man et cetera, which is ironic as it was this exact type of content, but about black people, they claimed somehow destabilized America and made Trump President. It couldn’t possibly be difficult to get to the bottom of this flood of AI garbage, but it’s what Facebook is now. Notifications don’t even show reliably and haven’t for years. Your newsfeed is often posts that are a week or more old so you feel like you’re stalking someone if you react, because that was Facebook culture 5 years ago when your newsfeed wasn’t a bunch of old posts. Even on Instagram, which is also owned by Meta, there are a lot of ads but most of them are for cool products or promoting content a person would potentially want to see like animals in little outfits or home projects. Your Facebook feed is just garbage that doesn’t serve an obvious purpose and is often quite literally “fake news,” like AI generated advertisements for movie sequels that don’t exist. When the content is real half the time it is a wonder why they would show it to you. For example, I am constantly getting pages about restaurants in the upper Midwest, a region around 1000 miles from anywhere I have ever been.
In case you have, not unsensibly, stopped using Facebook, here are more examples. This first one showed on my feed, and then disappeared when I went back to that tab to take a screencap, because that is the maddening experience of using Facebook:
In short, Mark Zuckerberg’s life’s work has completely gone to shit under a regime of people who care more about shaping society than they do about making Facebook enjoyable, but who are drastically failing at both. It is the laughing stock of social media, derisively called “Boomerbook” and not even used by Boomers that much. It is still used for arguing about local issues and the instant messenger remains prominent, but besides that it is good for little more than sharing pictures of your family, and Instagram is Meta’s specialized service for that. He may have never had a clear vision for what Facebook should be outside of a way to stalk the one girl in your computer science class, but regardless he certainly didn’t want it to be this.
We need to step back again and consider who Mark Zuckerberg is. The man who would become The Zuck made a fun website for his fellow students. He obviously had some good ideas and a talent for web design. However, he never had a vision for Facebook being what its become nor for the role it should play in society. Consider the contrast with Elon Musk who has had this “everything app” idea since the 1990’s and is obsessed with Mars. Zuckerberg seemed to genuinely feel bad at the impact Facebook was having on society, though less because of the Russian disinformation narrative and more because the Boomers who didn’t grow up with the internet seem to have had their brains fried by the whole experience.
On a personal level, Zuckerberg had something like Peter Pan syndrome, where he struggled to grow up past the hoodie wearing college nerd. The guy is only around four years older than me but has been rich and famous since he was in college, so our adult lives have been unimaginably different. Despite his fame, he was never respected nor feared and public jokes at his expense were not made with love. He has no fans, and no one looks to him for inspiration. Contrast this to the visionary engineer Elon Musk, the evil genius industrialist Jeff Bezos, and the sage-like Jack Dorsey. As much as I hate Star Wars-based analysis, I suppose it is appropriate when discussing a bunch of nerds: some of the public can imagine Elon Musk as Han Solo, Jeff Bezos as Darth Vader, and Jack Dorsey as Yoda, while Zuckerberg is stuck being C3PO. I guess a tech CEO Luke Skywalker arising to complete the analogy is our only hope.
Pop culture metaphors aside, the point is that all of those men are hated by some but they’re also loved or feared by others. In short, they evoke passion, whereas the most Zuck ever got was people cursing him when they got zucc’ed, a term he probably doesn’t care for. Zuckerberg tried to carve out a niche as a sort of benevolent oligarch on a quest to find the heart of America and make our union more perfect, but he only became more hated. The guy has the money to hire death squads to kill all of his enemies and get away with it, but he often seemed like it would be the best to stuff him in a locker. This must have always bothered him.
At some point, he started changing. Most notably, he got involved in martial arts and gained some weight. An article in The Daily Caller argues that physical violence made him a better man. There is every reason to believe this is true, because a man is not a man if he doesn’t have some strength and physical confidence in the prime of his life. Apparently he is actually pretty good at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, especially for a nerd who started training in his mid-30’s. His public relations continuously improved in an era where it was increasingly cool for men to lift weights and read Seneca instead of being nerds; I myself followed these trends at around the same time. He has also taken to dressing relatively better, still casually, but he looks decent. He has ditched the hoodies and the general schlubby look that he himself helped popularize. At times he reached some impressive heights of coolness, such as this 4th of July:
Some people claimed this was “cringe” and that he was “trying too hard to look cool.” As to the latter, he is obviously trying hard to look cool. Some things in life are hard to do and it is part of what makes them cool, and wakesurfing in a tuxedo and sunglasses while holding an American flag and drinking a beer is one of those things. God knows how long it took to get this shot or how much practice is required. He is trying hard to look cool and it was a smashing success.
On his path to becoming human, very shortly after this, Zuck also said the following about the Trump assassination attempt:
“Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life. On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”
Of course, much of America, including myself, went through something like this, because it was an intense moment. That was when Musk went full MAGA, so Zuckerberg’s response seems tame by comparison. Still, in his company and industry you were not supposed to view Trump as anything but a demon, nor acknowledge that people may like him for any reason besides disinformation and racism.
On the business side, Zuckerberg continued to give hints that he was not comfortable with the way things had gone. The demands of those wanting censorship never stopped and every populist success of any kind was blamed on “disinformation,” with Brexit being the other key trigger besides Trump’s election. Zuckerberg is not an ideological person and hasn’t experienced adult life outside of being a billionaire CEO, and he still lacked a vision for Facebook’s role in society. As the ban hammer came down on ever more things, he set up some sort of outside commission called the “Oversight Board” which we never heard about again, though apparently it is still chugging along. This was supposed to help with the “perception” of fairness, but had no such impact, and though there is one guy from the CATO Institute, you can tell from everyone’s jobs they are overwhelmingly likely to be center-left academics. In the summer of 2023, Zuckerberg gave an interview where one clip was widely distributed, in which he expressed serious misgivings about what had been going on:
In this clip Zuckerberg notes all the times that the government turned out to be wrong about things after pressuring Facebook to censor them. However, he says something that I find more interesting, which is that you can’t really censor people for being wrong in a way that isn’t harmful. Of course, what constitutes “harm” is a different question, but the point is you could find people engaged in a conspiracy to mislead or financially profiting from misinformation and suppress that content, but what are you doing as a social media company if people aren’t allowed to be wrong? Why are they even having a conversation? That is all to ignore the “who is the arbiter of truth” question, but the point is the human need to socialize is not fulfilled if you are prevented from learning from and teaching to the people you speak to regarding various matters. To err is human, as they say, and Zuckerberg has always wanted to be one of those.
The next big indication that The Zuck had had it was the letter he sent to Representative Jim Jordan, the head of the House Judiciary Committee, in August. In this letter he says that they were put under pressure from the government to censor both the Hunter Biden laptop story and content relating to covid, including humor and satire. While he acknowledges it was their decision to ultimately censor the content, he states an intention for the company to resist more in the future. He also announced that he is ending his involvement in politics, as there was a perceived bias in favor of “one party” [in a somewhat roundabout fashion he says he has seen data showing his political activities were neutral.] The letter made a stir as a direct admission of what many of us knew about government influence.
Then, of course, Trump won the election; Trump really won the election. In a way, it wasn’t a huge popular vote victory, but he deserves a handicap when you consider Kamala’s much higher spending, her free media support, and all the years of lawfare, and, of course, this entire “fact-check” and censorship apparatus. I don’t think Zuckerberg feels threatened by Trump’s anger at the behavior of social media companies so much as relieved that he can loosen the harness and try to recover his site. What he has previously been pressured into doing is a much bigger pain in the ass than not doing it, something ignored by everyone who is upset.
At the beginning of 2025 Joel Kaplan, a Republican, replaced Nick Clegg, the former head of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party, as the President of Meta after many years. Kaplan is one of the only Republicans in a high level position at the corporation, where in 2024 employees donated over $2.1 million to Kamala Harris but only a mere $38,000 to Donald Trump [91.49% of their Federal donations were to Democrats that cycle.] Shortly after Kaplan took power, Zuckerberg released his statement on the policy change, driving the liberal cabal into a frenzy.
Now that we’re finally here, I want to go over some key lines in the article, but first I want to briefly discuss a quote from an article at The Brownstone Institute from which I happen to be copying this transcript.
“The damage rippled through every layer of society. At the individual level, careers were destroyed and professional licenses revoked simply for sharing genuine experiences. Scientists and doctors who questioned prevailing narratives found themselves professionally ostracized. Many were made to feel isolated or irrational for trusting their own eyes and experiences when platforms labeled their firsthand accounts as “misinformation.”
Indeed. I know that 1984 is over-referenced, but want to mention when I read it as a young man, I found it to not be a particularly good novel and further that the useful concepts within it were already known in society. As an adult, closer to the age of Winston Smith, I found it a much better novel. This wasn’t just my age though, it was living through this kind of information control. Certainly it is less total, but it was easy to imagine what he is going through isolated and unable to verify the reality of his experiences, and having lived that way for many years. This is what this regime tried to create for us, and it is easy to imagine people who were from liberal families but saw through this but had no one to talk to and how maddening it would have been [seeing through it was maddening regardless, of course, but in different way.] Such a man can’t express dissent within his own family or at work, and everything you believe is instantly said to be untrue by these “fact-checkers” despite it being what liberals would call your “lived experience.” This is, to the sane, a far worse thing than you voluntarily getting caught up in some unapproved narrative which misleads you. You could be a world-leading scientist and some cat lady liberal ideologue with a degree in social science is the one who gets to decide if you’re spreading misinformation about your specialty. It was profoundly isolating and demoralizing.
Anyway, after an introduction where he states his belief in free expression and references the crazy five years we have had, Zuck says,
“There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content, governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously and I wanna make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.”
Facebook indeed has these responsibilities, both morally and legally. Kids die from fake vapes and drugs sold on Instagram. Terrorists recruit on the internet. The scourge of child pornography is extremely difficult to control. The obsession with suppressing political content, “fake news,” and all the other mind control gets in the way of managing these important tasks. The system is unnecessarily complex and thus makes more mistakes than necessary but it also then misses the more important things for it to catch. But of course, the government and legacy media don’t care about our well-being, they care about controlling us.
He continues,
“Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re gonna do.”
It needs to be noted that people think this is capitulation towards Trump but it is capitulation towards the public. All of their efforts couldn’t keep Trump out of office, making the election a clear referendum on what kind of country we want to live in that goes well beyond the realm of public policy. I don’t believe he had a Road to Damascus moment [I think, though, that he was always uncomfortable with how things had gone, but his level of responsibility made him risk averse and he also struggled to understand what was going on, as did so many in our society.] Instead of criticizing him for “blowing with the wind” perhaps conservatives should be happy that we are the wind. Another point needs to be made here, that was made by my friend Zaid Jilani:
That quip being, “politics is downstream from culture.” I wouldn’t go as far as Jilani, in that I think they both impact each other back and forth, but this class of ‘#Resist’ors accepting the victory is what I had dreamt of, and not because I supported Trump, but because their refusal to accept his 2016 victory and crafting this entire Russiagate lie and censorship apparatus drove me crazy. We can now have four real years of a Trump Presidency that are not defined by retarded investigations into if people spoke to their foreign counterparts and all the rest, and then move on with our lives. Regardless, the point is that political power has an enormous influence on the culture, especially in a country where it is said to represent public sentiments.
Next he says,
“First, we’re gonna get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we’re gonna phase in a more comprehensive community note system. Second, we’re gonna simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
They don’t even need community notes, but this a huge improvement. Community notes are also at least amusing, though in part because we have been so tormented by “fact-checks.” In their lamentations, these fact-checkers claim they are not biased at all, but of course they invented “Missing Context” to mean “this isn’t contextualized how I want,” when that should only be used if something is dishonestly edited. The problem is that they think center-left establishment politics supported by court academics is the objectively correct way to govern and the ultimate truth. The bias has been apparent to all of us for a long time and despite what they say it is not in our heads. Further, this has most definitely destroyed more trust than it has created, in part because of how often the “fact-checkers” have been wrong, such as, once again, the Hunter Biden laptop and the “lab leak” debacle, as well as all sorts of shit about the “vaccines.” We do, I think, need to give Zuckerberg at least a little bit of grace for believing a vast manipulation campaign, especially when he personally was the one on the defensive and being told, more or less, that “literally Hitler” getting elected was in large part his failure.
The aspect about the “mainstream discourse” I want to focus on more. Critics are pointing out that there will still be plenty of people banned, and behaviors not allowed, which is true. However, while we should fight for free expression, fringe views and anti-social behavior have always been suppressed in one way or another, and this is to be expected from people trying to run a public space in real life or on the internet. What was so nefarious about this is that they were going after mainstream opinions which moves from enforcing a degree of conformity for the purpose of social cohesion to social engineering. These are things you can say in Congress or on TV or in the coffee shop, and not just can say but that people do say all the time, but they would get you banned on Facebook. Of course, as long as there is an algorithmic newsfeed, there will be an element of social engineering, but it is much better if its purpose is to serve you good content, not to control all human interactions and remake society.
The bans were always under the auspices of what Facebook called “community standards.” Every time I saw this I thought of this scene in the David Simon show The Deuce where the proprietor of an adult store says of the Supreme Court ruling that legalized pornography, “…Something about community standards. Apparently New York doesn’t have any.”3 They never were “community standards” as the term would usually be understood, they were Facebook’s corporate standards. I mean, this is the internet, where telling strangers to kill themselves is our oldest tradition [thank God for the advent of MAID, which lets us tell people to go to Canada for healthcare, something which is essentially unbannable.] Even at the height of leftist social mania in 2020 they were far out of touch with Facebook’s users, who skew older and working class.
Zuck then explains what is wrong with “wokeness” overall, and though it’s not particularly insightful, it’s good to hear him say it:
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I wanna make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
“Political correctness” is fine when you’re calling adult females “women” instead of “girls” or using “Hispanics” instead of referring to Hispanics of any nationality as “Mexicans,” but this did indeed go crazy in a way that shuts down debate and excludes a lot of people. It also clearly makes racism worse by putting all sorts of reasonable discourse on the level of actual race-hatred. It seems to mostly have served the function of teaching people to be upset about new things, instead of reducing behavior which would upset them. More than anything though, the willingness to adopt whatever stupid new term [Latinx, anyone?] was seen as the signifier that you are on the “good” team. The point did become only to exclude and sort people into teams, and it wasn’t subtle.
After going on a bit more about how they’re dramatically reducing censorship and the lower sensitivity of the filter is a trade off, Zuckerberg says this,
“For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we’re in a new era now and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re gonna start phasing this back into Facebook”
I don’t think their making Facebook useless for politics was the right decision at the time or in retrospect, but I do believe him that they got this feedback. I myself had that feeling at the time, and perhaps mine was one of many posts they saw on the matter:
The problem is the Biden Administration turned up the heat on everything. Whereas people thought they would end covid once Democrats were in power they doubled down on it and further tried to reshape the country on the barest of margins. They went so far as to not be satisfied with the rational “pandemic” end point of the vaccine being available for every adult who wanted one but instead needed us to all agree that the vaccine was great and you would die without it [the vaccine being available for everyone was the nightmare absolute longest anyone thought the “pandemic” could possibly go on when it started, by the way.] They also relentlessly persecuted their political opponents, most notably anyone who was present on January 6th, and of course Trump himself. Throughout this, with Trump banned and politics suppressed on Facebook, we had less power against their machinations, as the Biden Administration went censorship crazy. In short, if things had played out differently, greatly reducing the politics on Facebook may have been a reasonable decision, but the Democrats were never going to give us a break from politics.
The next crucial part is this,
“Fifth, we’re gonna move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”
I initially found this funny and surprising, but it makes more sense the more I think about it. Amidst a stream of ridiculous articles which I will get into shortly, Wired makes some good points about the benefits of Texas for Facebook, including a state law against political censorship on social media. Thinking about it, beyond locating the team Texas changing public perception, I constantly get the feeling that these censors have no idea how people talk. The experience of living in Texas, even if in the liberal enclave of Austin, will give them a better idea of what is acceptable social behavior in America that you don’t get in San Francisco where you can shit on the sidewalk but its “harmful” to suggest people shouldn’t smoke fentanyl on public transit. Further, one has to imagine that the most extreme ideologues among them will refuse to move to Texas as a matter of principle. There was some hilarious hyperventilating about this in Taibbi’s article about the NYT comment section:
Now I do think that some of these states including Texas took their abortion laws too far, but if Texas has 31 million people and you usually figure a quarter of the population are women of childbearing age, that is around 8 million fertile women who live in Texas currently, but sure, it’s impossible to move there with your wife and daughter. That said you probably do want to divorce any woman who wouldn’t move to Texas because of the abortion policy [in general, they seem to not realize how many people believe in legal abortion but would not get one within their own marriage, but that is another matter.]
Zuckerberg concludes by saying that he wants the US government’s help fighting censorship in other countries, noting that the US finding this appropriate has caused more censorship everywhere. He then says that the era where their focus is on removing content is over and now they are more focused on not wrongfully removing content. While we have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Zuckerberg, it is undeniable that this change of policy is a massive step in the right direction.
Following all of this, Facebook took it a step farther, and joined the trend of axing its DEI program, saying that they would no longer pursue diversity goals but instead would hire and promote fairly. It really is the end of an era.
So what has the reaction been? Relief from you and me, but other people are very upset. To quote Taibbi, “What kind of person is opposed in principle to less censorship? Readers of the New York Times, apparently!” He goes through a variety of amusing comments, though I suppose the ones that take the cake are the people saying this change will make this more like 1984, not less, and another who says, in essence, that his father didn’t fight in World War II just for people to not censor things. As I have written about at length, these most hardcore Democrat partisans have been broken by their leaders. It would be quite depressing to be a sane person of liberal sentiments at this time in American history:
In terms of commentary on this matter though, a New York Times headline is a timeless work of art:
The article is relatively less stupid than that ridiculous headline, which isn’t a big achievement. It’s popular to hate on The New York Times, but who else would provide us with content this hilarious? This should be a satire headline but is so much more funny when it isn’t. The basic explanation is that it isn’t their fault if people followed their advice and anyway they weren’t actually the ones making decisions about how to treat fact-checked articles. The “International Fact-Checking Network” has an open letter if you want to see their side. Along with the usual nonsense you would expect about how they have all these standards and studies that show calling right wing sources false much more often isn’t biased because they are false more often [in isolation a compelling argument if not for how often the “mainstream” media lies.]
There are two things that stick out. The first is that they keep saying “fact-checking is itself free speech.” It sure is. No one is saying they shouldn’t be allowed to share an article and give their opinion on its accuracy, like countless millions of people do every day. The current system that is ending however is Facebook giving them money and then automatically attaching their “fact-checks” to articles, which is in no way just free speech. The second thing they keep saying is that their newsrooms may shut down and that they employ “many talented journalists.” Now, there are certainly situations where getting to the bottom of media reporting to figure out what is fake news requires serious journalistic mettle, such as the big Columbia Journalism Review article on Russiagate in 2023 which of course made the fact-check industry look quite bad since they promoted that entire narrative. However, what these people are primarily doing is literally the equivalent of the first assignment in Writing 101 where a grad student is tasked with making sure you understand how to use sources. If any talented journalist is doing this it would be a soul-crushing waste of talent. I fact-check various things several times a day and it rarely takes more than a single search and a few sentences. Much of the time they are fact-checking idiotic things posts that any reasonable person would recognize as a joke or otherwise woudn’’t bother with. Brian Stelter provided us with a good example of this, and despite it being part of a longer thread I am not at all sure what point he is trying to make:
No, Brian, that fact-check did not help anyone, all you have done is horrify us that a woman [presumably] agreed to have sex with you, and depress us that you have done the world the disservice of procreating, though we can take comfort in assuming you are a literal cuck. Anyone who thinks this dull-witted regime apologist was packed off to Guantanamo Bay cannot be made better or worse for anything that is said to him. In fact, the people who “actually believed it” were almost definitely joking, something “fact-checkers” notoriously fail to pick up on. What “real world harm” could this possibly cause? Anyone who is going to believe that, then see that Stelter is free and try to kidnap him and turn him over to the FBI is very obviously so crazy that the solution is institutionalization, not explaining the truth. At least it was good for a laugh:
There’s something to understand about the brain of the modern liberal partisan here that goes beyond trying to enforce their political program or “real world harms.” Have you ever noticed that liberals have an obsessive need for everyone to believe in evolution? It isn’t just their concern about public school curriculum, which is a public policy matter, but they really need everyone to believe in evolution [obviously evolution should be taught in schools, and it is not at risk of not being taught.] Nothing could be farther from having an impact on your daily live than the billion year process of us arising from bacteria, yet everyone must believe it, and they don’t want to share a society with people who don’t. The reason for this is rather simple even if hard to initially discern: these are people who don’t have the mental fortitude for atheism but who nevertheless lack religion. Thus, in the absence of papal bulls, they need there to be universal truths, and they need everyone else to believe them, no different from a feeble minded religious zealot. This is why their devotion to this fact-checking industry is so extreme.
For more amusing commentary on this matter, you could no do better than Wired, a rare surviving publication that has not moved on from the social mania of 2020. In a series of breathless articles they paint a dark portrait of a MAGA-fied company where people can suggest that wanting to cut your penis off may be a mental illness. On January 7th alone we got:
“Meta Follows Elon Musk’s Lead, Moves Staffers to Billionaire-Friendly Texas”
“Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have 'Mental Illness’”
and, “Meta’s Fact-Checking Partners Say They Were ‘Blindsided’ by Decision to Axe Them”
It was clearly all hands on deck. The last one non-ironically shares this quote:
“According to Duke, it is disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse the organizations in Meta's US third-party fact-checking program of being “too politically biased.” “Let me fact-check that. Lead Stories follows the highest standards of journalism and ethics required by the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles. We fact-check without regard to where on the political spectrum a false claim originates.””
As well as this one:
“It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said in an emailed statement. “Fact-checkers have not been biased in their work—that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”
The Democrats persistently threatened to strip their liability and Zuckerberg just said that the Biden Administration had people calling and screaming and swearing at them to censor, but sure, the Trump transition team is putting them under extreme pressure.
The next day they gave us “The X-Ification of Meta” with the subtitle: “By abandoning fact-checkers and loosening its Hateful Conduct policy, Meta has made clear the future it wants for its platforms.” This article includes the line “used the fig leaf of “free speech” to make alarmingly permissive changes to its Hateful Conduct policy.” It goes on to say, “X seems like it should be a cautionary tale rather than a North Star for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Advertisers and users alike have reportedly fled in droves since Musk took.” They seem to not understand that things are changing and that DEI programs are dropping everywhere. This entire regime is not continuing, and Facebook is one of the largest tech companies so it is setting a standard. Twitter has also been extremely active, all those reports of its demise notwithstanding. They then, with notable quotation marks, give us this line:
“The appeal to “free expression” mirrors Musk’s, although in Meta’s case it seems less about commitment to abstract ideals than it is a concerted effort to make nice with MAGA; Meta has spent years unsuccessfully trying to counter claims of bias from conservatives and now has chosen to abandon the fight entirely. You can’t work the referees if there aren’t any to begin with.”
They couldn’t counter claims of bias because those claims were true, which is exactly what the “fact-checkers” refuse to admit.
Axios also got in on the act, giving me some entirely new information about wokespeech. They write, “The policy uses the words "homosexuality" and "transgenderism" — the former is an outdated term, and the latter is used nearly exclusively by opponents of transgender rights.” I didn’t know what you’re supposed to call either of those things, but then they informed me further down,
“A Meta representative declined to comment further or answer a number of questions from Axios, including: when was the policy developed, who was consulted inside and outside of the company and why Meta decided to use the terms "transgenderism" and "homosexuality" instead of standard terms for gender and sexual identity.”
Standard to whom? This is what he is saying about being outside of the mainstream. Who talks like this? Also if it says gender reasonable people will assume you are talking about sexism towards real women. It seems for now that Facebook’s trans employees are on [probably literal] suicide watch because we won’t all be forced to accommodate their delusions. This comes from an article republished at Zerohedge:
These don’t seem like good employees. I think Meta would be lucky to get rid of them, but what we still need to know is if we are again allowed to say “tranny.” Another part of the article notes that “While the moves are billed as boosting free speech, many Meta-watchers say that the relaxed policies will actually chill speech for those in targeted groups.” I suppose that doesn’t need commentary, but as they say, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. A legion of shitposters being dicks does not actually impact your free speech.
Lastly, the neocon rag The Bulwark gave us a great article calling Zuckerberg a “surrender monkey.” The article at no point considers that perhaps the intention is to give users what they have shown they want. This could only be fear of Trump.
Last writes,
“We’re seeing this impulse to surrender across American society right now. Where the forces of authoritarianism never give up and never apologize, big chunks of liberal society are bargaining and capitulating without even trying to try to stay independent first.
You see it in the media. You see it in the business community. You even see it in parts of the Democratic party where some elected pols seem to think that they should be “working with” Trump rather than acting like the opposition party.
And the more surrender monkeys there are, the more surrender monkeys we’ll get. Because capitulation is contagious.”
What did the #Resist and constant investigations and panic and fact-checkocracy get you? Donald Trump won the popular vote despite all of your efforts. It is over. The best move is to actually show you can be a reasonable opposition and to accept the public’s decision and plan for the future. It isn’t generally the case that corporations are in the business of having an oppositional relationship with Presidents of either party if it can be avoided. Donald Trump will be the President and everyone believes he won fairly. Opposing him in the normal fashion that recognizes him as the leader of our country is what it seems even most of his opponents want, after 8 years of insanity, denial, and conspiracy mongering from the people who claim to be the arbiters of the truth.
So where does this all leave us? It many ways it feels as if reality is reconverging after 8 insane years of American public life. There are certainly malcontents, but the most egregious aspects of a specific experiment to reshape society have failed and are being rescinded. Many “fact-checkers” will be forced to find productive employment. Facebook may actually move back to some usable form after these freaks who all but destroyed it are gone. While it is sure to have its problems, I think my friend Cassandra is right that we may get a more stable experience from Zuckerberg than we can expect out of Musk:
For myself, I will be making a point of using Facebook more again, in part to signal my approval of these changes, and because I am ever more nervous about the stability of the situation on Twitter.
As for Mark Zuckerberg, for the first time he has come off as an actual human. I am still no fan of the guy, but it’s easy to see how he was too caught up in his own responsibility to see through the Russiagate nonsense, and then later thought a degree of deference to the government regarding covid was merited. He probably almost never speaks to anyone who doesn’t believe in these things, having been in the position he is in his whole adult life. I think Jeffrey Tucker is correct here:
He has been a coward and was in some ways instrumental in creating the era we just lived through. At the same time, he has also shared the experience of it in his own way and that clearly impacted him. He has come to the same conclusion as America at large, realizing that Trump, for his faults, is another politician that people support for various reasons and not some Siberian Candidate placed in power as the result of a vast conspiracy. He also seems angry that he has been made to look like a bitch as his company has been discredited and his life’s work has been destroyed. It is in his self-interest to have a different future and he seems excited about a new Trump era, not as if he is acting from fear.
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg has just blown with the wind, and still is, but these changes to Facebook policies say really good things about the winds of American life in 2025. While I wouldn’t want to be too optimistic about how Facebook will change, I think we can be sure of one thing: none of this signifies it is getting worse.
We should take the win over the fact-checkocracy and deal with Zuckerberg continuing to disappoint us as it arises.
Addition 1/11: I wish I would have looked at my Facebook memories while editing last night. This one, from the beginning of the fact-checkoracy, was the best way to end this piece:
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Despite the fact that I am not a woman and was joking, it was strangely offensive for Facebook to accuse me of being a whore.
I’ve usually always seen the accounts which claim no one sees their posts, and I believe that the companies figure I can’t get any worse so try to keep me occupied among my own kind.
The ruling was essentially that pornography would be allowed on a case-by-case basis, if it didn’t violate the standards of the community, which is to say it was allowed in neighborhoods with strip clubs and hourly hotels, but could be banned in neighborhoods with schools and churches.
I realized that in the Star Wars analogy Tom from Myspace is definitely Obi Wan Kenobi 😂
The retardery of the left's responses to Zuck's about face boggles my mind. I can't help but wonder if a single one of them doesn't self identify as an "activist" of one sort or another.
To pick just one example from your article that is particularly pertinent to myself: "Homosexuality" is in no way an outdated term. That somehow "queer" IMMEDIATELY overtook any other word in the sexual orientation lexicon was always highly suspicious. I've been "out" for twenty-two years and never met a single gay person who was offended at the term "homosexual".
There's just no way a full scale vocabulary replacement like that happened organically. And the thing is before the forced adoption of the term I wouldn't have been offended at being called queer either. It was only when "queer" became the ONLY allowable term that it became an offensive and suspicious term to me. Especially when long-standing gay/homosexual/fag icons like Oscar Wilde and Tom of Finland started being referred to as queer. A true WTF development.