In November 2016, as facebook was blamed for a torrent of fake news and conspiracy theories surrounding Donald J. Trump's first election, Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's chief executive, wrote an apology post.
In his message, Zuckerberg announced a series of measures he planned to take to deal with false and misleading information on facebook, such as working with fact checkers.
“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously.” <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103269806149061″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>he wrote in a personal facebook post. “There are many respected fact-checking organizations,” he added, “and while we have contacted a few, we plan to learn from many more.”
Eight years later, Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday it announced that Meta, the parent company of facebook, instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, would end its fact-checking program and return to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said.
It was the last step in Zuckerberg's transformation. In recent years, the CEO, now 40, has moved away from his mea culpa approach to problems on his social platforms. Fed up with what sometimes seemed to be incessant criticism of his company, he has told executives close to him that he wants to return to his original thinking on free speech, which involved a lighter hand in content moderation.
Zuckerberg has reshaped Meta as he made the shift. Gone is the transparency tool CrowdTangle, which allowed researchers, academics and journalists to monitor conspiracy theories and misinformation on facebook. The company's election integrity team, once billed as a group of experts focused solely on voting-related issues, has been integrated into an overall integrity team.
Instead, Zuckerberg has promoted technological efforts at Meta, including his investments in the immersive world of the so-called metaverse and his focus on artificial intelligence.
Zuckerberg's change has been visible on his social networks. Photos of him awkwardly wearing a suit and tie and testifying before Congress have been replaced by videos of him with longer hair and gold chains, competing in extreme sports and sometimes hunting his own food. Long, lawyer-heavy posts on facebook about Meta's commitment to democracy no longer appear. Instead, he has posted jokes on Threads responding to famous athletes and videos showcasing the company's latest ai initiatives.
“This shows how Mark Zuckerberg feels society is more accepting of those right-wing, libertarian views that he's always had,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a technology consulting firm, who previously worked at facebook. “This is an evolved return to its political origins.”
Zuckerberg has long been a pragmatist who has gone where the political winds blew. He has changed his mind about how much political content should be shown to facebook and instagram users, previously saying that social media should be about fun, relatable content from family and friends, but then on Tuesday saying Meta would show more personalized political content.
Zuckerberg has told executives close to him that he is comfortable with the new direction of his company. He sees his most recent steps as a return to his original thinking on free speech, with Meta limiting its monitoring and control of content, said two Meta executives who spoke with Zuckerberg last week.
Zuckerberg was never comfortable involving outside fact-checkers, academics or researchers at his company, one of the executives said. It now views many of the measures taken after the 2016 election as a mistake, the two executives said.
“Fact checkers have simply had too much political bias and have destroyed more trust than they have created,” Zuckerberg said in a <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1525382954801931″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>video Tuesday about ending the fact-checking program, echoing statements made by top Republicans over the years.
Meta declined to comment.
Those who have known Zuckerberg for decades describe him as a born libertarian, who enjoyed reading books that extolled free speech and the free market system after he dropped out of Harvard to found facebook in 2004. As his company grew, so did It was pushing to become more responsive to complaints from world leaders and civil society groups that it was not doing enough to moderate content on its platform.
Crises, including a genocide in Myanmar, in which facebook was blamed for allowing hate speech against the Rohingya Muslim people to spread, forced Zuckerberg to expand moderation teams and define rules around speech on his networks. social.
People close to him, including former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, coached him to become more involved in politics. After the 2016 election, Zuckerberg embarked on a public campaign to clear his name and redeem his company. He held regular meetings with civic leaders and invited politicians to visit his company headquarters, implemented transparency tools like CrowdTangle, and hired fact checkers.
In 2017, he announced that he was conducting a “listening tour” across the United States to “gain a broader perspective” on how Americans used facebook. Campaign-like photo opportunities with farmers and autoworkers led to speculation that he was run for political office.
Despite his efforts, Zuckerberg continued to be blamed for misinformation and falsehoods spread on facebook and instagram.
In October 2019, Zuckerberg began to fight back. In a speech at Georgetown University, he said that facebook had been founded to give people a voice.
“I am here today because I believe we must continue to defend freedom of expression,” he said.
In 2021, when the January 6 riot broke out at the US Capitol after the presidential election, Meta was again held responsible for organizing a speech that encouraged violence. Two weeks later, Zuckerberg told investors that the company was “considering measures” to reduce political content on facebook.
Its evolution since then has been constant. Executives who pressured Zuckerberg to get directly involved in politics, including Sandberg, have left the company. Those closest to him now applaud him as he focuses on his own interests, which include extreme sports and rapping for his wife, as well as promoting his company's artificial intelligence initiatives.
In a podcast interview in San Francisco that Zuckerberg recorded live in front of an audience of 6,000 people in September, he spoke for nearly 90 minutes about his love of technology. He said he should have rejected accusations that his company was responsible for social ills.
“I think the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake,” he said. He added that it could take another decade to get his company's brand back to where it wanted it.
“We will get through this and come out stronger,” Zuckerberg said.
