Mark Zuckerberg can do with his social media giant Meta as he pleases and he aims to please the prevailing views of the federal government. The return of Donald Trump to the White House coincides with the naming of key Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White to its board and abruptly deciding to move away from using fact-checking partners to combat the spread of disinformation and loosened its hate speech rules and also scrapping DEI programs. We don’t see how this will improve the experience for the billions of users.

Four years ago, when Trump lost, Zuckerberg had Meta tamp down on conspiracies after Trump’s election denial and Jan. 6 attack and banned the defeated president from Facebook and Instagram. Now, Zuckerberg is swinging the other way.

Meta is a publicly-traded but private company and they can make any content and moderation decisions they want, when they want. There’s no legal argument to be made against this turn away from fact-checking and towards a more freewheeling, more disinformation-laden, more confusing, more hateful and less illuminating approach.

The timing mostly makes sense here if you take this not really as a principled stand on speech but as an effort to curry favor with an incoming administration helmed by a man that essentially built his brand and political movement on a rejection of shared reality and adherence to narratives, even if those narratives were false. To say that Trump lies is almost beyond the point; every politician fibs but Trump has no use for the truth if it doesn’t aid his cause.

By that token, a turn away from a focus on accuracy and moderation is not an above-the-fray, non-ideological decision. It won’t impact the postings of people who tell the truth and believe in reality. Those who benefit will be the peddlers of lies and provable garbage, on everything from the efficacy of vaccines to the reality of climate change to the basic fact of who won the 2020 election.

Claims of bias against what are by and large dedicated journalists and fact-checkers striving to hit as close to the mark of truth as is possible are often simple acknowledgements that one movement is more in the business of falsehoods, yet these claims are now coming from Zuckerberg himself.

Beyond fact-checking, there’s much to take away from the modifications to speech policies, including the detail that Meta has explicitly carved out LGBTQ identity from a prohibition on referencing or alleging users’ mental health or illness status. What is this, a throwback to the discredited idea from a half century ago when the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? That was dropped in 1973, the last time it was acceptable in civil society to call a gay person mentally ill. Moving in this direction is, once more, not an apolitical choice but a starkly political one.

There was a time when Zuckerberg sang a tune, making public assurances that the company was aggressively tamping down on fake news as it faced escalating pressure in the aftermath of its role in the 2016 election. It seems like Zuckerberg has adjudged the winds are blowing differently now, to the detriment of our public discourse.

___

©2025 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.