Zuckerberg in MAGA mode: politics by other means.

By: Carlos Cortés

This text originally appeared in the Network of Experts on Democracy and Technology in alliance with La Silla Vacía. Listen to the audio version here.

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In the same press conference in which he proposed a policy of economic pressure to annex Canada to the United States and insinuated military interventions in Panama and Greenland, Donald Trump was asked about the changes in Meta. In an Instagram reel, Mark Zuckerberg had announced that they will end thefact-checking programs, simplify the platform's rules and move part of the staff from California to Texas.

- Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you have made to him in the past," the journalist asked.

- Probably...yes, probably," Trump said with brash satisfaction.

At the end of the movie Trump always wins. In January 2021, Meta suspended his Facebook and Instagram accounts for instigating the takeover of the Capitol in Washington. Last August, the then-candidate promised to jail Mark Zuckerberg "for the rest of his life" if he intervened in the presidential election. Three months later, Zuckerberg dined with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago mansion. And, this week, the Meta founder folded wholeheartedly into Trumpism.

The news comes as no surprise. The conversion process of several leaders in the digital sector has been going on for some time. In addition to Elon Musk, who bought Twitter to turn it into the megaphone of the Trump campaign, there is Jeff Bezos, who gave the line for his newspaper, the Washington Post, to refrain from expressing his support for any candidate -as he used to do and this time he was going to opt for Kamala Harris-. The same Washington Post that a few days ago censored the cartoonist Anna Telnaes precisely for portraying Bezos' obsequiousness before Trump. And on the same path is the famous capital investor Marc Andreessen, once a disciplined Democrat, who supported Trump in the campaign and, according to himself, now spends half his time advising him.

Getting in tune with the zeitgeist of gringo politics, Zuckerberg stopped being the disciplined executive who in 2018 was beating his chest and apologizing in the U.S. Congress for his company's potential damages. Last September, he said that having paid so much attention to public pressure over Meta's problems was a "twenty-year political miscalculation." Now, with longer hair, a tan and sporting T-shirts with slogans in Greek ("Learning through suffering," read one), he seeks to look defiant.

Zuckerberg will not only turn Meta's content policy on its head, but he is also moving key chips to align himself with the incoming administration. Dana White, president of the multinational mixed martial arts company UFC and a close friend of Trump's-so much so that he stopped by the stage on the day of his election-entered the board. Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan, meanwhile, took over as global vice president for public policy from Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister. Kaplan made his debut commenting on his new boss's announcements on Fox.

The main goal of Zuckerberg and the other digital pooh-poohs is to shake off domestic investigations in the United States and assemble a bloc to confront regulatory and judicial advances from countries with relevant markets such as India and Brazil and, above all, from the European Union: "We're going to work with President Trump to counter governments around the world. They are attacking U.S. companies and pushing for more censorship." In any case, Zuckerberg was emphatic in clarifying that the changes will initially be implemented in the United States. It's one thing to play home and another to play away, and Brussels has proven to have teeth.

From journalism and civil society, reactions have ranged from alarm to panic. Philippine journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa predicted "extremely dangerous times" and a "world without facts" fit for a dictator. Accountable Tech's Nicole Gill warned of an increase in online hate, misinformation and conspiracies to come. And, according to technology reporter Casey Newton, a former Meta employee considers the decision a "precursor to genocide."

Despite the undoubted concern that an alliance between Meta and MAGA Universe represents, and that the decision was communicated in a "deeply dishonest" manner, in the words of Information Futures Lab co-founder Stefanie Friedhoff, these responses overlook the erosion of the current model. With good intentions, but also with tunnel vision, the Democrats, Silicon Valley and a sector of civil society structured a series of interventions around online freedom of expression that are in the process of being rethought. An approach that, in addition, contributed its grain of sand in strengthening the reactionary project that is returning to the White House.

Content moderation and censorship

"Governments and traditional media have increasingly pushed censorship," Zuckerberg said at the beginning of his statement. He adds later, "The recent election also looks like a cultural tipping point toward, once again, prioritizing expression." Prioritizing expression will take the form of removing some restrictions from Meta's rules - the community standards - on issues such as migration and gender.

For example, opinions about sex and gender that may be insulting or exclusionary in the context of political discussions will now be afforded greater protection. Also, statements of mental illness or abnormality related to gender or sexual orientation will be tolerated. Previously, in both cases, these types of expressions were not allowed.

Although Zuckerberg version 2025 pretends to disassociate himself, he was part of the Silicon Valley leadership that imprinted that vision in the rules of the platforms and that Trumpism has always disqualified as a suffocating culture of political correctness and censorship. It has been no small dilemma: social media is rife with hateful content, bullying and discrimination against women, communities and minority groups. But, likewise, limitations on the dissemination of information and opinions are ambiguous, with lists of excluded words, cases and exceptions, which Artificial Intelligence does not resolve and content moderators -mostly 'call center'-style contractors - must evaluate in seconds. The result is an inconsistent system, impossible to scale and full of 'false positives'.

"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to silence opinions and exclude people with different ideas, and it's gone too far," Zuckerberg said by way of justification. Beyond the fact that in this Meta spin he lets his vacuousness show and simply copies Musk's parley, the fed-upness he raises is at the core of the problem.

For authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, demands for equality and social justice are in tension with liberal principles of free speech. The progressive cause has focused on elements such as the subjectivity of offense, potential harm, and equations of speech with forms of violence, a purpose that has become dogmatic in confronting defiant expression. In these conditions, right-wing populist movements pose as saviors, peddling the idea that they are making "a last, desperate defense of liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism."

The action of arbitrating people's behavior in digital spaces is today a minefield of politicization, polarization and disputed identity claims. According to analyst Renée DiResta, "rather than simply limiting what could be said online, the rules seemed to indicate which perspectives had power in the digital public square." At the end of the day, users see the moderation that affects them as the fruit of bias.

During the 2016 presidential election, Republicans demonstrated their ability to dominate the public conversation by deploying lies and attacks through cable television and coordinated social media operations. The Cambridge Analytica episode - somewhat magnified by the press and capitalized by critics - was the postcard of that moment. The instrumentalization of freedom of expression to then capture it and assume its defense as a right was a very damaging innovation for the public debate. Today it is a trademark of Trumpism.

Then came the pandemic, a historic episode that reminded us how bad we are at judging our present. In the midst of uncertainty and public pressure, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were creating rules on the fly, removing content and suspending accounts that made risky recommendations or spread false information about the public health crisis (it was even forbidden to say that the virus had come from a laboratory in Wuhan). For the Republicans, who always criticized the excessive controls during the pandemic, it was an excellent opportunity to consolidate their narrative.

Fact-checking and community notes

Without abandoning the provocative tone, Zuckerberg made another structural determination in the face of the last eight years of work against online manipulation: "We're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the United States." He added: "After Trump was first elected in 2016, the traditional media wrote non-stop about how disinformation 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 been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created."

Indeed, with the verdict of public opinion against it, at the end of 2016 Meta (then Facebook) launched the global fact-checking program with civil society organizations. By 2023 it had about 90 members in more than 120 countries verifying information in 60 languages. According to company figures, by 2022 it had invested US$100 million in the project. However, as LatamChequea's regional alliance explained, "in no case do the checkers decide what happens to the content".

In general terms, the program works as follows: through automated systems and with human support, Meta identifies problematic publications, prioritizes some and refers them to external verifiers -in the case of Latin America, media outlets such as La Silla Vacía and Animal Político, and organizations such as Chequeado, Ecuador Chequea and Colombiacheck-. After a review and contrasting work, these third parties may qualify the content as "false", "altered", "partially false" or "without context".

Meta uses these inputs to tag content, provide a link to verification, and even reduce the visibility of the post. Content and postings by politicians and officials are not eligible for the vetting process because, according to Meta, limiting this speech would "leave people less informed" about what these actors say, and make them "less accountable for their words."

A simple glance at this mechanism allows to understand its limitations. While fake news is manufactured in bulk and rides on motorcycles -more so now with AI tools-, verifications take longer and go on foot. Almost as a complaint, Meta has reported to the Content Advisory Board - a sort of 'Supreme Court' created by the company in 2020 - that an overwhelming majority of the material in the verification queue is never reviewed by fact-checkers.

Charging civil society for the elephant in the room of social networks may be politically profitable at present, but it does not solve the problem. Unwanted content - misinformation, threats, doxing, harassment, sexual exploitation - is not a mere externality of the platforms, but a product. The attention economy optimizes noise and interaction at all costs. Give me the incentives and I'll tell you the outcome.

Community notes, which practically replaced content moderation in X, are now proposed by Zuckerberg as an alternative. These glosses to posts made by qualified users are an interesting tool for self-regulation and context, but they have their own limitations. Around the crisis in Venezuela, for example, community notes became another forum for speculation and lies. To think that this will be the solution, at zero cost to companies, is an invitation for authorities and regulators around the world to intervene. In Brazil, Lula gave Meta 72 hours to explain the termination of the verification program.

That said, the true impact of this Meta initiative cannot be ignored. It is not about the alleged biases argued by Zuckerberg. According to the figures that the same company presented to the European Union, just 3% of the errors due to 'penalties' to content visibility came from fact-checking reports. The challenge actually lies in the limited scope and effect that fact-checking has.

On the one hand, the decentralization of platforms and fragmentation of audiences makes it difficult for the checks to reach those who consume disinformation in the first instance. False content is constructed simultaneously on many fronts, open and closed. On the other hand, and even more difficult, manipulation is due to factors that cannot be solved with factual diagnoses (on this subject, I wrote this text a couple of months ago). The evidence indicates that there are variables that are difficult to address in terms of space, time and adherence.

This does not mean that fact-checking should be abandoned. Although, as LatamChequea states, "fact-checking journalism did not start with the Meta program", it was the main funder. For journalism and civil society this product had become an economic lifeline, and hence the discontent with this news goes beyond public interest. In the long confrontation between social networks and the media, where the former took over the business and then the trade, this episode will only deepen the list of grievances.

All this is happening while we watch the action from Latin America as mere spectators. For internet platforms, content moderation in the region has never been a priority. And although community standards have protected in many instances users exposed to attacks or intimidation, wrong and arbitrary decisions against activists, cartoonists and simple opinionators also abound (in Circuito we have documented several cases). Meanwhile, civil society demands transparency and compliance with human rights standards, while governments and legislators improvise solutions in the face, of course, of the tribune of social networks.

Twitter's transformation into a zombie at the hands of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's opportunistic flip-flop inaugurated a new chapter in the digital era. The challenge is tactical and strategic. We must work on practical solutions to weigh and resolve people's expectations of expression. We must also understand the structural reasons behind policy proposals that undermine democracy and enjoy popularity. But we will not advance in that effort without a critical spirit in the face of the convictions that drive the cause and the stories we tell. And that, as I once posted on Facebook profile status in the past decade, is complicated.