Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa slams Zuckerberg for axing fact-checkers

OPINION

Mark Zuckerberg's decision to do away with fact-checking is giving carte blanche to  the liars and conspiracy theorists to use social media to twist the truth or simply make things up to mislead, confuse, distort facts and tear down trust in the institutions of a functioning democracy.

Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa said Zuckerberg’s decision to end factchecking on its platforms of Instagram, Threads and what was formerly Facebook, means “extremely dangerous times” lie ahead for those who depend on  media, and governments who depend on facts and truth to sustain their legitimacy.

Zuckerberg's bending the knee to Donald Trump means Meta's three social media platforms -- Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will eliminate fact-checking services, planning instead to rely on the Facebook community to police itself. Yeah, sure. For a picture of what that looks like, just take a look at X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk's attempt to give himself a megaphone. 

When Musk took over Twitter, what was arguably the Western world's most popular town square, he fired all the factcheckers and monitors. Since then, it has devolved into a cesspool of hate, racism and just plain made up posts of where MAGAists, science deniers and those with evil intentions can thrive to spread their disinformation among themselves -- as if repeating lies and fantasies enough times  make them true. The person with the loudest and biggest loudspeaker wins.

Zuckerberg's announcement last week shoots down a pillar of the right-wing's distorted view of the world; that the mainstream media, especially the world: the high tech industry is biased on favor of progressive ideals of justice, equality and accessible opportunities.

Ressa, the Filipino American journalist, splitting her time time between Manila where she works, and her relatives living in New Jersey, said Zuckerberg’s move to relax content moderation on the Facebook and Instagram platforms would lead to a “world without facts” and that was “a world that’s right for a dictator.”

Zuckerberg has spent years trying to build on his apolitical position of a businessman trying to do good. But his shift to the right should not be a surprise. It took years of meeting with critics demanding some sort of means to filter out the hate and misinformation crazies and foreign forces were coursing through Facebook, the world's most popular social media platform.

With the fear of losing advertisers and the federal government agencies bearing down on him, a few years ago, the Silicon Valley billionairereluctantly agreed to allow third-party factcheckers to do what he didn't want to do.

With Trump's victory, Zuckerberg saw a path where he could shed all the rules, regulations and responsibilities,not to mention the negative publicity. By doing away with fact-checking, he's siding with Musk and Trump. Under the guise of "free speech," he's allowing anyone to say whatever they want and damn with the truth and consequences.

“Recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Instagram. “Factcheckers have just been too politically biased.”

Well, not really. What may have looked like  a bias against conservative views is because the preponderance of the untruths being spread were coming from the radical right and foreign sources seeking to weaken democracy such as Russia, the Peoples' Republic of China and Iran.

The only reason these foreign actors and MAGAists have not been more successful in destablizing the United States form of democracyan  was because of army of fact-checkers.

Zuckerberg added that Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

The Meta CEO, who recently had dinner with Trump at Mar-A-Lago, lambasted coverage of  theincming President by “legacy media, which has pushed to censor more and more” and said that his own company’s previous content moderation policies resulted in “too much censorship” and had “gone too far.”

Trump, who constantly lies about everything and regularly gets the "pants-on-fire" rating from fact-checkers, no doubt, is quietly cheering Meta's new position on fact-checking. Since he ran for President in 2016, he has complained that his lies have been stymied by Facebook's fact-checkers and was banned from what used to be Twitter because of his constant lies and spreading falsehoods as truth.

"Fact-checkers strongly support freedom of expression, and we’ve said that repeatedly and formally in last year’s Sarajevo statement. The freedom to say why something is not true is also free speech," said the International Fact-checking Network in a letter to Zuckerberg.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, left, once embraced Mark Zuckerberg's, right, Facebook.

Perhaps, what hurts the most is that Zuckerber's bending-his-knee to Trump feels like a betrayal. The problem is it was a mistake to think that Mark Zuckerberg was "one of us" because of the his invention of Facebook, which became the medium used to unite its users and a means to connect with family and friends. We thought that Facebook, (and by extension, all social media) was the technology of the future. How could  something so useful and potential for doing good, wind up as a tool bad.

We fhave forgotten that back when he was a Harvard student, Zuckerberg's initial purpose for inventing Facebook was to rank women on a scale of 1-to-10 based on their looks and/or availability. Facebook's original goal was misogynistic and not not at all alturistic. 

Therefore, no one should be surprised in Zuckerberg's caving into Trump and Musk. In other words, Zuckerberg is just being Zuckerberg, an adolescent longing for approval and hoping to hang out with the "in" crowd.

Nevertheless, the platform gained more popularity  around the world. Ressa embraced the new technology as a way to increase getting the democratic process into the hands of the people. The Philippines became one of the biggest users of the platform.

Her position changed with the advent of the arriveal of the Rodrigo Duterte presidency in the Philippines. He employed armies of digital warriors to spread disinformation to the people of the Philippines. The campaign strategy worked too well to Ressa's chagrin. During his 2016 campaign, Duterte was able to bypass the traditional Philippine media, once known for its aggressiveness, and spread his lies  directly to the people and to bully his critics.

"Fact-checking is essential to maintaining shared realities and evidence-based discussion, both in the United States and globally," wrote the Network, part of the nonprofit media organization Poynter Institute.

Ressa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her commitment to freedom of the press and her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, told the Agence France Press: "Mark Zuckerberg says it’s a free speech issue – that’s completely wrong. “Only if you’re profit-driven can you claim that; only if you want power and money can you claim that. This is about safety.”

Ironically, AI generated this statement about the future, or at least for the next four years: "'truth' or 'facts' will not objective realities, but rather will be determined by whoever is presenting the information, allowing them to define what is considered a fact based on their perspective or agenda, potentially manipulating the narrative."

"We are looking at a near-future where Meta’s platforms are defined by coordinated networks of state-aligned accounts, untrammeled, professional trolling operations with significant resources, the systematic manipulation of platform architectures, and sophisticated falsehoods produced at scale," writes Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa, the former Research Director at The Disinformation Project .

"It’s clear that Meta’s new policy isn’t just about reducing moderation costs or appeasing MAGA in the U.S.; it is about consciously choosing to be complicit in future atrocities whilst maintaining plausible deniability," says Hattotuwa. 

“Journalists have a set of standards and ethics,” Ressa contnued. “What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform.”

Ressa warns that Zuckerberg's decision means “extremely dangerous times ahead” for journalism, democracy and social media users. 

Hattotuwa agrees: "A company that once promised to connect the world has instead chosen to profit from its fracturing, one life, one community, one violent conflict, and one genocide at a time."

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X or at the blog Views From the Edge.