Mediaite founding editor Colby Hall called Mark Zuckerberg ending Facebook’s current fact-checking methods and his embrace of President-elect Donald Trump a “stunning pivot,” but one with clear obvious motives.
Hall joined NewsNation on Tuesday to discuss Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement for Facebook and Instagram, platforms which will be embracing a more “community notes”-style model used by Elon Musk at X to fact check posts. Zuckerberg said current fact checking models on his social media platforms have “gone too far.”
“Fact checkers,” according to Zuckerberg, have “just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.”
Hall argued a community notes-style system is backed by a lot of users, rather than suppressing posts, but he also noted that the “devil is in the details” and Zuckerberg will need to account for foreign organizations purposefully posting disinformation.
Hall said:
I think elections have consequences. And I think when he says it’s gone too far with regard to sort of content moderation, that reflects what a lot of people are thinking about, sort of our over-reliance on identity politics and the pendulum swinging back the other way, and Facebook has long seen itself as sort of the town square. If you were in the town square and someone said something that you found to be offensive, you wouldn’t call the cops on them. You would
sort of ignore them, right? So in that regard, I think it makes a lot of sense, right? Where the questions arise is, you know, there’s news outlets that are owned by China and Russia who purposefully post disinformation, and so are we going to leave that to community nodes? The devil will be in the details, and I suspect that they’ll be on top of that.
He added that Zuckerberg’s “stunning pivot” towards Trump could be motivated by other “tech bros” like Musk doing the same, but also an upcoming antitrust suit that Zuckerberg’s company Meta is facing in April. The lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission alleges Meta has a monopoly-style power in social media through acquisitions of other platforms beyond Facebook.
“It’s a stunning pivot from Mark Zuckerberg being kind of the nerdy kid at MIT to this sort of curly haired necklace wearing jiu jitsu guy who’s clearly appealing to the Trump administration when [there’s] a big antitrust suit that they’re facing in April. So it’s a pretty stunning pivot on a number of levels,” Hall said.
Zuckerberg and others want to work “hand in glove” with Trump in this second administration, he added, which is also exemplified by Zuckerberg teaming up with Trump allies, like making UFC’s Dana White part of Meta’s board.
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