The “news” is not just bad these days; far too much of it is perniciously and intentionally false. More and more Americans have come to rely on the free “news” that shows up on social media sites like Tik-Tok, Facebook and X. But even though hate speech, misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories proliferate on social media, the task of filtering out the very worst of it all ––terrorist posts, child pornography and blatantly illegal content ––takes time and money, as “content moderators” must do the difficult and sometimes mentally damaging work of keeping social media sites from becoming a pile of reeking garbage.
Once Trump was re-elected, Zuckerberg joined other billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in kissing Trump’s ass. “Zuck” met with Trump at Mar-A-Lago, donated $1 million to his Inaugural Fund, appointed GOP apparatchik Joel Kaplan to lead Facebook’s policy team, and added UFC’s Dana White, a longtime supporter of Trump’s, to the Board of Trustees. He followed up by announcing that Facebook was dispensing with its fact checking process. A major reason for that seems to be that the “right-wing noise machine” (see below) has been screaming for years that “Silicon Valley” and “Big Tech” was “censoring” right wing views.
But don’t expect “fairness and balance” from the right wing propagandists any time soon. This is so, even with having the two biggest social media platforms in their pockets, and even with ABC paying millions to Trump to not legally defend the not-very-far-from-the truth of Stephanopoulos use of the word “rape” in describing Trump’s sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll. ( As the brilliant Tom Lehrer once said about “smut,” “more, more, I’m still not satisfied.”) Indeed, even with Truth Social now peddling lie after lie, having X and Facebook allowing even more right wing b.s. on its platforms, and Jeff Bezos pulling the Post’s endorsement of Harris, the “right” will not be satisfied until journalists are jailed and “Marxists” eliminated from all teaching positions at U.S. universities.
As Robert Reich posted on Substack Jan. 10, “The flurry of defamation lawsuits — such as Trump launched against ABC (and ABC caved to) and the Des Moines Register — is the latest sign. Trump and his allies have also discussed revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television. . .Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, has threatened to “take on the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen, and no it’s not Washington, D.C., it’s the mainstream media and these people out there in the fake news. That is our mission!” (Just watch the GOP controlled Senate supinely consent to Patel’s nomination to be the chief law enforcement officer in the land.)
And . . . Trump and Patel’s “enemies of the people” are guilty of what, exactly? Oh, that would be “trying to tell the truth to the American people.” (After all, how can U.S. citizens stay under Trump’s spell if others are pointing out his mendacity? Better to also prosecute the leaders of the January 6 commission in Congress who were trying so hard to reveal the truth about that day and the events leading up to it.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s tech-bro Musk is evidently “all in” to personally spreading conspiracy theories and vicious lies. Once Musk took over X, he removed Twitter’s imperfect guardrails. Quickly thereafter, notes Rolling Stone, “a major online resource many relied on for news and information was overrun by the manipulative trolls formerly relegated to the fringes of the social web. Misinformation about wars, health, climate change, elections, and more flourished alongside violent rhetoric and hate speech. At the center of it all is Musk, whose turn to hard-right ideology has led him to spout and amplify untruths with abandon, algorithmically forcing them onto an audience of millions.”
NBC news reported in October of 2024 on research that showed that “an AI-powered bot army on X spread pro-Trump and pro-GOP propaganda. The report details “a coordinated AI campaign using large language models (LLM) — the type of artificial intelligence that powers convincing, human-seeming chat bots like ChatGPT — to reply to other users.”
X has been using “user moderation” to tame the beast of malicious falsehoods, but where the users are “bots” deployed by one political side, propaganda thrives. Now, Meta will be using the same “methods” that Musk uses on X to moderate content, which amounts to almost nothing. In doing so, he placates partisans that have been active for over forty years to attack the truth and promote right wing views.
Like Trump, the “right wing noise machine,” backed by billionaire money, has been attacking truth for some time now. David Brock admits he was once a willing tool, writing screeds about Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” (for testifying truthfully about right-wing darling Clarence Thomas). His 2004 book, The Right Wing Noise Machine, details “the tactics used by right-wing groups to pressure the media and spread misinformation to the public.” Brock admits to forwarding “the right-wing agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations.”
But, back to “Zuck” and how he justified turning his back on monitoring Facebook for pernicious falsehoods:
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” said Meta CEO Zuckerberg, justifying the end of Meta’s content moderation program. “The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.” Kaplan adds: “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do.”
But if there has been bias, it has been bias in favor of posts by right-wing users.
The right wing noise machine has been wailing for years about “censorship” by leftist social media platforms, much of it escalating when Twitter and Facebook temporarily (and rightly) banned Trump from social media after he instigated the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Many Republicans have long believed that social media sites censor conservative viewpoints. But overall, more news influencers explicitly present a politically right-leaning orientation than a left-leaning one in their account bios, posts, websites or media coverage,” Pew Research has said.
Their research found that contrary to claims of right-wing censorship, news influencers were more likely to lean conservative, with 27% explicitly identifying as Republican or pro-Trump, compared to the 21% who identified as liberal. On Facebook, there were three times as many explicitly conservative news influencers (39% to 13%), and on Instagram conservatives outnumbered liberals, 30-25%.
But the truth about bias did not stop Florida and Texas from passing laws that excoriated Silicon Valley “censorship” (i.e., content moderation), giving the state attorney generals and state residents a legal cause of action for social media censorship. But again, don’t expect that Zuck’s capitulation to the far right’s ongoing campaign against truth will satisfy the noise machine, even as he and Musk dominate social media by promoting vicious lies. When he’s not sending “poop emojis,” Musk himself promotes false information in at least a third of his “tweets” (or X posts).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/elon-musk-x-posts.html
Also, contrary to Zuck’s assertions about Facebook putting an end to needless censorship, the firms that Meta has hired to do the fact-checking tell us that he’s flat out lying. (“Company over country,” was one of Zuck’s frequent mantras in Facebook’s early years.)
We should note here that the First Amendment holds a special place in U.S. life, and encourages most kinds of speech, other than speech that is obscene, pornography involving children, and speech that may incite violence. That includes hate speech, talk about conspiracies (#StopThe Steal, Pizzagate, etc.), and rank disinformation (“Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump.”)
Because of the First Amendment., our legal system leans over backward to promote more speech, and one influential Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, proclaimed in a 1919 case that more speech was a good thing, because it added to “the marketplace of ideas.” Holmes’ basic idea was that too much government censorship should be avoided, and that “the people” could capably separate the true from the false, and could separate fact from fiction.
But instead of a marketplace of ideas, we have a marketplace of misrepresentations, half-truths, conspiracy theories, and outright propaganda. And people want to read what confirms their existing biases; social media allows them to live in “filter bubbles” and to go down “rabbit holes” of disinformation.
“In summer 2019, a new Facebook user named Carol Smith signed up for the platform, describing herself as a politically conservative mother from Wilmington, North Carolina. Smith’s account indicated an interest in politics, parenting and Christianity and followed a few of her favorite brands, including Fox News and then-President Donald Trump.”
“Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory and movement that claimed Trump was secretly saving the world from a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists.”
“Smith didn’t follow the recommended QAnon groups, but whatever algorithm Facebook was using to determine how she should engage with the platform pushed ahead just the same. Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.”
Unlike social media platforms, the “mainstream media” have some journalistic standards, and actually pays people to find and “report” facts that the public needs to know in a democracy. Mainstream media, unlike SMPs, actually have a significant check on them: a news operation can be sued for defamation if it tells untruths about an average citizen, or shows “reckless disregard” for a public official. (In England, it’s far easier to bring a defamation action against the print and broadcast media.)
But “America” is exceptional. Part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act grants immunity to social media platforms (SMPs) for posts made by users, the now infamous section 203 of the CDA. Thus, a user (such as the many “influencers” that young voters now follow) can say absolutely anything at all on X (and now, Facebook), touting it as absolute truth, even where there is no investigative reporting or fact checking. Because SMPs are not the originators of the falsehoods, but only conduits for those lies, the SMPs cannot be held accountable. Fact-checking was thus a means to keep the SMP free of the most outrageous B.S. and blatantly illegal stuff, but it costs money, and since there is no liability for whatever gets posted from a user, CEOs of SMPs need not pay for fact checking at all.
In sum, it’s perfectly legal for social media platforms to spew a firehose of lies and conspiracy theories, with no one held accountable for infecting the marketplace of ideas with spurious claims furthered by AI bots. X has become a sewer of misinformation and propaganda, and Zuck is following suit. In doing so, he surrenders to the bogus claims of “radical left censorship” on social media. But for Zuck (“company over country”) it’s a safer bet to wave the white flag rather than (a) spend a lot of money on fact checkers, and (2) face the wrath of Trump and his allies. (Reportedly, fact checkers at Facebook were given less than an hour’s notice before being run off the Menlo Park “campus”).
As the new fountainhead for the ongoing right wing noise machine, President Trump has the bully pulpit, and forth from it comes a bullhorn full of bullshit. Truth no longer matters. As Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, supposedly said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
Trump’s incessant talk of “enemies within” our nation is deeply ominous, far more so than “the deep state” he keeps talking about. It’s reminiscent of the Joe McCarthy era, where the Wisconsin Senator repeatedly accused others of being “communist,” even with scant evidence. It was a dark era for free speech and thought in America. We have become, “thanks” to social media, a massively misinformed public. All that is perfectly legal, but creates a most imperfect system of democratic governance.