How Zuckerberg’s Meta Policy Changes Empower Trump’s Disinfo Machine

In a display of capitulation and self-interest, Mark Zuckerberg just announced content moderation changes that will benefit Donald Trump and empower right-wing disinformation to spread unchecked.

Donald Trump welcomes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to the Oval Office - Sept. 19, 2019 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

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On Tuesday morning, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement that paves the way for more disinformation to flourish during Donald Trump’s second term and could twist Meta’s platforms into a mirror image of Elon Musk’s X.

Wearing a Black t-shirt and gold chain, Zuckerberg released a video where he casually announced that Meta would be making six key changes. Zuckerberg said Meta will be ending expert fact-checking in favor of a Community Note model similar to Elon Musk’s X; they will remove content restrictions on topics like immigration and gender; they will reduce their automated content filter scans; they will begin promoting more political content; they’re moving their Trust & Safety team to Texas; and they will be working with President Trump to reduce Meta’s censorship in other countries.

Meta owns several of the largest social media platforms on the planet - Facebook (over 3 billion active users), Instagram (over 2 billion active users), Threads (over 200 million active users), and WhatsApp (over 2 billion users). Needless to say, Meta’s announced changes are sweeping and will have wide ramifications for our digital information ecosystem.

The announcement comes amid an avalanche of foreign leaders, business executives, and some media outlets cozying up to Trump in an effort to garner favorable treatment or to avoid retribution. Zuckerberg has been chief among them, with Meta donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, Zuckerberg visiting Trump at Mar-a-Lago, appointing Trump ally Dana White to Meta’s board, and now, announcing sweeping changes to Meta’s policies that clearly benefit Trump.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Trump has threatened Zuckerberg, writing in a book that Zuckerberg should “spend the rest of his life in prison.” Perhaps more important to note is the fact Meta is set to head to trial in April for an antitrust case brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which accuses Meta of running a monopoly and illegally purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp. Those factors undoubtedly weigh on Zuckerberg’s mind. Also, TikTok has been encroaching on Meta’s market share, so a successful FTC antitrust case would be devastating to Meta’s business.

In a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Trump was asked, “Do you think [Zuckerberg] is directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?”

Trump simply responded: “Probably. Yeah. Probably.”

You read that right. Trump openly admitted that Zuckerberg is “probably” changing Meta’s content policies in response to his threats. This appears to be blatant, transparent capitulation with a side dish of humiliation.

The announcement was filled with an effort to flatter Trump. Zuckerberg said, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

Joel Kaplan, a Republican who was once White House Deputy Chief of Staff under President George W. Bush, was just promoted to Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer. After Zuckerberg made the announcement on Tuesday, Kaplan appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss Meta’s moves and doubled down on the false claim that Trump is somehow a champion of free speech.

“There’s also no question that there has been a change over the last four years,” Kaplan told the Fox & Friends panel. “We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity. Now, we’ve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”

The audacity of that statement is unbelievable.

Trump has filed numerous defamation lawsuits against media companies, threatened to jail journalists, warned that he would go after media organizations’ broadcast licenses, has vowed to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protestors, and has called those who disagree with him “the enemy within” who he may also use the military against. Trump is not a champion of free speech - he is a threat to it.

So, why do Meta’s moves benefit Trump? Aside from the anti-incumbency trends in the post-pandemic era, right-wing disinformation narratives played a major role in Donald Trump’s victory. Trump’s lies about the economy, immigration, and a wide array of cultural issues penetrated the mainstream discourse. With key propaganda allies like Elon Musk’s X, Fox News, and the broader network of manosphere podcasts, this increasingly powerful, well-funded right-wing information infrastructure helped reinforce the false unreality Trump presented to the country.

Disinformation is a challenge I’m particularly passionate about. Aside from my journalism work, I’ve also delivered lectures on media literacy and disinformation to over a thousand college and K-12 students over the past two years. The proliferation of disinformation on social media is already an incredibly difficult problem to solve, and the fact it appears it’s about to get worse is something every American should be paying attention to.

Let’s analyze these changes from Meta, why they’re so important, and how journalists should respond.

1. Replacing Expert Fact-Checkers With X-Like Community Notes

The first change in Zuckerberg’s announcement came as a shock to the fact-checking industry. Zuckerberg said:

“First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US… The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.”

The notion that fact-checkers are politically biased is a right-wing talking point. When one side of the political spectrum utilizes disinformation more than the other side, they will receive more fact-checks. That’s not bias - that’s an effort to uphold objective reality.

We’ve seen how this move to community notes has played out on Musk’s X, as right-wing disinformation has spread unchecked. A top European Union Official has called X the largest online source of disinformation globally.

There is also ample data that indicates, although flawed, fact-checking has proven effective. The New York Times has done in-depth reporting on this, pointing to multiple studies showing the effectiveness of fact-checking labels:

“A study published last year in the journal Nature Human Behavior showed that warning labels, like those used by Facebook to caution users about false information, reduced belief in falsehoods by 28 percent and reduced how often the content was shared by 25 percent. Researchers found that right-wing users were far more distrustful of fact-checks, but that the interventions were still effective at reducing their belief in false content.”

If fact-checks on Facebook have proven to work, then why would they get rid of them? Perhaps the answer is in the question.

2. Rolling Back Content Restrictions

Zuckerberg said that Meta will be rolling back some of their more restrictive content policies, meaning we’re likely to see a rise in hate speech. From Zuckerberg's announcement:

“Second, we're going to 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. 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.”

The fact Zuckerberg explicitly named “immigration” and “gender” as topics that will see reduced content restrictions tells me that the xenophobic and transphobic posts we see reigning supreme on X will now also thrive on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

3. Reducing Automated Content Filter Scans

Zuckerberg also announced that Meta will be reducing the automated processes of identifying and taking down posts that violate Meta’s rules:

“Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. For lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.”

If Meta really is weakening the automated systems that identify rule violators, then it will make it slow to respond to dangerous content, relying instead on people reporting content.

4. Promoting More Political Content

There’s another part of Meta’s announcement that hasn’t gotten enough attention:

“Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. 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 going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”

After deprioritizing political content during President Biden’s administration, Meta suddenly wants to promote political content in user feeds after Trump won. What a coincidence.

Taking these changes together, Zuckerberg is essentially rolling back content rules and automated processes that tamped down right-wing disinformation and simultaneously re-promoting political content in more users’ feeds. This could lead to more widespread radicalization, as we’ve seen on X.

5. Moving Content Teams To Texas

Zuckerberg announced another move that was straight out of the Elon Musk playbook:

“Fifth, we're going to 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 it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

Moving Meta’s Trust & Safety and Content Moderation teams from a blue state to a red state speaks for itself.

6. Working With President Trump

Zuckerberg then said the magic words that Trump wanted to hear:

“Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They're going after American companies and pushing to censor more…”

Announcing an open collaboration with President Trump is emblematic of the wider right-ward shift within Silicon Valley. Meta also has an interest in getting Meta more access in countries with restrictive content moderation laws - like those in the European Union. It appears Zuckerberg wants Trump to pressure these countries to weaken their social media regulations. We’ll see how that plays out.

How Journalists Should Handle This Disinformation Age

Well before these changes at Meta, we’ve existed within a Disinformation Age where our media consumption is fragmented, and there are no universally agreed-upon facts. Our social media feeds are at the whim of corporate-engineered personalized algorithms that are designed to reinforce our preexisting biases and capture our attention at all costs - even if that cost is the truth.

Gone are the days of the dominant Big Three networks - ABC, NBC, and CBS - and major newspapers delivering centralized news in the mid-1900s. Americans now receive their news from a wide array of sources, from podcasters to social media creators. The gatekeepers are gone. While this has created great opportunities for honest independent media to rise, the incentive structure of an internet dominated by the attention economy encourages shameless, lying grifters as well.

Biologist Edward O. Wilson once said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” The human brain isn’t built to consume this onslaught of information and hasn’t yet evolved to adapt to this unrelenting pace of technological advancement.

This information environment has been expertly utilized by a right-wing media ecosystem that has weaponized lies to exploit Americans’ distrust in institutions and innate human vulnerabilities - all for Trump’s benefit. Now, with Meta’s changes, this right-wing media ecosystem will have more flexibility to continue to mislead Americans and the world.

This new information environment requires more honest, forceful journalism.

When it comes to Trump specifically, journalists need to be clear-eyed about the fact Trump sees information as a weapon, not a tool to promote truth. We know how he operates this time. He lies for a reason. We need to go beyond simple fact-checks and spotlight the intent of his disinformation campaigns and how they fit into the machinery of his broader plans.

Trump’s track record of lying invalidates any reasonable assumption of good faith, and I think his lies should be covered that way. Trump doesn’t accidentally spread misinformation. He intentionally spreads disinformation without shame, apology, or further explanation.

Trump and his right-wing allies have used disinformation to gaslight and mobilize the public against Trump’s targets (migrants, media, political opponents, and institutions) as a means to justify his authoritarian plans. It appears social media companies plan to further enable these efforts.

Because the United States doesn’t have a federal algorithm transparency law, we’ll have no idea if Zuckerberg is making other changes that promote pro-Trump propaganda and right-wing viewpoints like Elon Musk has. We’ll only be able to observe from the outside and call out lies when we see them.

Now, more than ever, we’ll need more fearless journalism to promote truth, especially as so many social media platforms have proven they will do nothing to stop the lies.

I wrote about this in more detail in a previous article if you want to dive in further. Thanks for reading!

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