When asked if he thought Mark Zuckerberg’s effective ending of fact checking was in response to threats that he would “put him in jail for a very long time,” Trump replied, “Probably. Yeah, probably.” A week later, TikTok voluntarily disabled their app for users, then put up an announcement saying that Trump was going to bring them back.
Julian talks to digital disinformation expert Renee Diresta about the massive Big Tech realignment with MAGA, which now means Meta, X, and TikTok may become more like TruthSocial. If fact checking is biased, content moderation is censorship, and combating foreign propaganda is anti-free speech, where does that leave us now?
Show Notes
If you Give A Mouse a Cookie: Renee Diresta
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The evolving debate between free speech and online content moderation may be the defining issue of our time.
Its importance has certainly escalated rapidly over the last 10 years.
As 2025 begins, we are staring down the dilemma of online media at a whole new scale under Trump 2.0.
Because now not only Twitter or X is trending further to the right along the lines of alternative tech platforms like Telegram and Truth Social and Rumble, but what we used to call Facebook and now to TikTok are looking like they're about to join the Wild West anti-moderation, but what we used to call Facebook and now to TikTok are looking like they're about
Today, we'll talk about Mark Zuckerberg's pre-inauguration announcement of new rules at Meta, which includes Facebook, Instagram and Threads as our starting point.
Along with the recent little choreographed dance between TikTok and the American government.
Once we get going here, disinformation researcher, professor, and author Renee DiResta will help us make sense of the latest developments.
Now, I don't know about you, but as a progressive atheist, I started off as a free speech absolutist.
Fast forward to today, and I'm firmly in the anti-disinformation camp.
The internet changed everything, and then social media changed it once again.
Our worldviews simply have to adapt, and that need not betray our values.
I'll share a little today as well about how and why I took that journey.
Welcome to Conspirituality.
I'm Julian Walker.
I grew up under real government censorship.
The police state of apartheid South Africa of the 70s and the 80s censored the news to cover up their atrocities against the black population.
There was one TV channel and therefore just one official version of the news.
Newspapers were increasingly censored as the civil rest and anti-apartheid movement became more and more active and effective.
Unless you knew people on the ground, Citizens were kept in the dark about what was really going on in our country.
Now, we got American movies, but only as long as they weren't too subversive.
Easy Rider, for example, was banned.
So too Rocky Horror Picture Show.
And Hair.
Countercultural themes, interracial relationships, gay love stories, rebellion against oppressive governments, all of that was forbidden on the silver screen.
The country had a Dutch-reformed Christian foundation, which meant that there was no business conducted on Sundays, no movie theaters were open either, no sporting events, and all liquor stores were closed at 12 noon on Saturdays as well.
All of that background to say that I had always associated any limitations on free speech as being an expression of religious puritanism, Or right-wing political repression.
Having fled that country to come here and build a life, the ACLU's famous defense of Nazis having a right to march in Skokie, Illinois, made sense to me under the rubric that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
As an atheist, I cheered on the advent of YouTube.
And the profusion of newly emboldened critiques of religion and the reemergent conservative right-wing influence on our culture and government.
In an overwhelmingly Christian nation, isolated little islands of open atheism suddenly felt free to come out of the shadows and speak within a larger community online.
This seemed to be true for more traditionally marginalized communities as well.
The internet overcame oppressive taboos and enabled a level of representation and solidarity that looked progressive in the ways that famous left-wing Berkeley University free speech activists of the 1960s, I imagine, would have celebrated.
But something really changed as the internet evolved, as social media became more dominant, as the exponentially exploding deluge of posts created the need.
To organize interest groups and sort content into algorithmically relevant streams and as tech-savvy political actors learned how to work these systems.
And the dynamics of all of this are widely discussed now, with the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data scandal and Russian interference in the 2016 election becoming a high watermark.
But even that has come to represent how much our realities have converged.
And then there's everything we've covered about COVID and QAnon and the phenomenon of conspirituality, which has culminated now in Maha and Trump 2.0 and the almost completely polarized bifurcation of our news and commentary media spheres into non-overlapping realities, often with perverse incentives.
I know, this is all a much deeper and longer discussion than we have time for today, but I wanted to set it up a little bit like this for relevance.
But let's get into the main topic.
In case you've forgotten, on January 7th, yes, that's the day after the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riots, incitement of which at that time got Trump banned from Twitter, on January 7th, Mark Zuckerberg published a text and video announcement.
About some changes at Meta.
These included replacing their third-party fact-checking with the type of community notes approach now used on Twitter or X, lifting restrictions on certain types of political posts, reducing content moderation, and relocating those moderators from California to Texas and relocating those moderators from California to Texas so as to be less biased.
They also included wanting to work with the Trump administration to deal with censorship issues in other countries.
Now, it just so happens that incoming President Donald Trump wrote in a new book that was published just this past September that Zuckerberg had plotted against him during the 2020 election, and he should spend the rest of his life in jail if he did it again.
Yeah.
I turned to Rene DiResta.
Who I've interviewed a couple times before here on Conspirituality.
The first time was in May of 2023, when Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi, in their role as Twitter files journalists, and I use that term loosely, given that they were handpicked by Elon Musk, and then they were handed select internal communications to examine as part of their reporting.
So Taibbi and Schellenberger named Rene de Resta in their congressional testimony as being at the center.
Of a conspiracy they claimed to have uncovered between tech companies, university research programs of which she was involved, and government intelligence agencies to supposedly censor right-wing free speech and COVID contrarianism.
And this resulted in sweeping information requests for documents and emails dating all the way back to 2015 from Representative Jim Jordan's House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Most of this government-driven liberal censorship somehow was deemed to have happened under the Trump administration.
Renee DiResta was labeled as the head of the censorship industrial complex, a term that was then picked up widely on right-wing media.
Now, because of her history, studying first how anti-vaxxers and then-jihadist groups used social media to circulate dangerous beliefs, Diresta's career culminated in heading up the Stanford Internet Observatory, as well as participating in their election integrity partnership as part of government and big tech initiatives to combat disinformation and propaganda campaigns that were attempting to disrupt American elections.
She's testified before Congress and advised tech giants on content moderation.
And all of this earnest and important work...
Led to her book, Invisible Rulers, for which I interviewed her in June of 2024, as well as being smeared by the kinds of COVID grievance mongers, anti-vaxxers, and conspiratorial censorship martyrs who are now set to be in positions of unprecedented power in the new administration.
If Renee's early work as a concerned mom in 2015, understanding how a vocal minority of anti-vaxxers could sway public opinion.
And then her work investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence prefigured the COVID misinformation crisis and the new open season for social media propaganda that were entering.
The Stanford Internet Observatory may have been the canary in the coal mine because it seems to have caved to actual weaponized government pressure and threats of cutting funding to universities which study propaganda by not renewing DiResta's contract and cutting several key jobs.
Their main fundraiser, Alex Stamos, left citing political pressure amid claims from the university that grants were running out and they were seeking new funding.
The work that the Stanford Internet Observatory had done through the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020 and 2022 was dramatically scaled back or shut down by the 2024 election year.
So now, as Trump 2.0 begins with the unmoderated Elon-era version of Twitter in full swing, Mark Zuckerberg has announced a radical about-face in Facebook's content moderation policies.
Including the end of third-party fact-checking.
And when he was asked whether he thought the Facebook announcement had to do with Trump having threatened to put Zuckerberg in jail, the new president answered, probably.
Yeah, probably.
So this led me to ask Rene DiResta.
What is jawboning?
So jawboning refers to informal pressure or persuasion, usually by government officials or somebody with political power, to a private company that is trying to get them to act in a certain way, a way that isn't supported by law or regulation.
So it's an informal pressure.
It's the government using its power or the threat of it to kind of indirectly bully people into doing what they want when they can't flat out force it.
And it's bad, just to be clear.
Jawboning is bad.
This kind of jawboning influence has been alleged against the Biden administration.
Missouri and Louisiana tried to sue Joe Biden, falsely claiming that the White House engaged in a campaign to censor conservatives on social media.
And that case ended up getting thrown out of the Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett really clearly explaining why they had no standing.
This hasn't stopped RFK Jr., though, from trying to make similar claims against Joe Biden that he was censored with his anti-vax messaging during the pandemic.
We have Zuckerberg and Meta now.
The interesting dynamic is that even though we've had this court case related to jawboning ostensibly from the Biden administration, what we've also seen in recent months has been that Jim Jordan and the weaponization committee were investigating Meta.
There were rumors that they were trying to bring Zuckerberg in for a hearing.
And then in response to that pressure, he wrote a letter.
And in his letter, he apologized for a bunch of things that the right was upset about.
He also apologized for things like his nonpartisan election donations, that people might have read them the wrong way.
And so what we're seeing there is an interesting indication that that Coercive pressure, that effort by government to make a company or a powerful individual act in ways that they want them to act.
We're seeing that job-owning, it seems, going in the other direction.
In the post and the video announcing these new changes, Mark Zuckerberg gave the impression that fact-checking had started off with all the best intentions, but it had become too politically biased.
And that made me want to ask Renee DiResta about one of the terms she uses a lot.
In her writing on this, it's called Working the Refs.
So Working the Refs, referees, it's a metaphor from sports, of which I know very little about sports, but I like this metaphor.
Because in a sports game, you'll see a team, you'll see somebody get nudged ever so slightly, and then they'll fall on the field, clutching themselves, and they perform to try to make the referee make a call that favors them.
And so Working the Referees refers to this process where...
Continually alleging that a referee is biased or making unfair calls against you actually aims to pressure the referees to treat you better, to make calls in favor of the complainer because they don't want to seem biased.
They're very upset about that allegation.
So that's what working the referees is.
Platforms are tools of power, right?
They're incredibly important for getting political messages out, for activating online fans and factions.
And so recognizing this, what we've seen over the last decade or so is the right and the left have each refworked on platform policies, trying to change the rules to advantage their side in some way, to increase their distribution, have more of their content get seen, have less of their content come down.
And, you know, this is a...
It's an interesting strategy, but it's one that seems to work, and that's because very little regulation is actually passed on these things.
So this effort to persuade, to make the platform change its rules through persuasion, is how most platform policies have changed over the years.
And in the case of fact checking, which you mentioned, so Zuckerberg claimed that there was some partisan bias to the fact checkers.
He presented no evidence of this, just to be clear.
There was no evidence that was presented to back up that rather bold claim.
But the right has for a very long time reframed fact checking as something partisan, as something biased against them.
And so by echoing that language, Zuckerberg is sending a signal.
You know, to the people who have made this argument for a very long time that he agrees.
And then he capitulated through the changing of the policy again.
Only in the United States this change was not made overseas where fact-checking continues to happen.
And that's because it was much more a response to a U.S. culture war dynamic than it was to any demonstrable evidence that any of us have seen that fact-checking is somehow biased.
I just want to comment here on the sociopathic genius of lying all the time and then complaining when you get fact-checked that it's biased against you because your claims are getting fact-checked more than anybody else's.
I'm going to include a link in the show notes to a January 11th article that Renee wrote about the Zuckerberg announcement.
It's titled, If You Give the Mouse a Cookie, and she borrows this term from a popular children's storybook.
And this is a metaphor that she's using here for meta-appeasing the Trump administration.
The implication, of course, is that it doesn't stop there, because if you know the storybook, if you give a mouse a cookie...
He's going to want a glass of milk.
If you give him a glass of milk, he's going to want a napkin.
And so the story continues.
Conceding to political pressure in this case, whether by loosening content moderation rules or tweaking policies, it often leads to escalating demands, right?
The appeasement rarely satisfies the critic.
It just emboldens them.
And they will make further requests for more concessions.
And I think what we saw in the case of Facebook is that yielding to pressure from one administration really set a precedent for how future demands might be handled both from that administration, but keep in mind this is a global platform.
Communicating that you're willing to change your rules in response to this kind of political pressure means that we should expect to see more political pressure from other powerful political figures who want the rules to advantage them in whatever country.
That the platform isn't going to want to have to moderate the political leaders who use that type of speech.
That it's not so much rank-and-file Americans who talk like that.
That it's actually going to be, you know, not wanting to moderate speech about, quote, filthy immigrants, right?
If it's coming from a political leader.
And we've seen that kind of rhetoric from folks, you know, part of the new administration.
Facebook not wanting to be in a position of having to moderate that maybe means that it made some calls that are going to have profound impacts on ordinary people, not only in the U.S., but overseas as well, because that particular policy is global.
So I mentioned at the top that at Trump's inauguration, it was widely reported and there were photographs of how there was this who's who.
Of tech oligarchs with front row seats.
They were hobnobbing with the new cabinet nominees.
So you had people like Zuckerberg and Musk and Bezos and Tim Cook from Apple.
And then seated beside Tulsi Gabbard was the TikTok CEO, Shozi Chu.
And there had just been this very theatrical few days.
Involving TikTok voluntarily taking themselves down and then bringing themselves back up and having this performative kind of statement when it was down for 24 hours or something.
That said that we were working with President Trump essentially to bring us back and help save TikTok from the terrible censorship of the Biden regime, which, you know, was...
Literally 24 hours from being a thing of the past.
Calls to ban TikTok originated with Trump and many of the Republican inner circle at the time.
They became bipartisan after some briefings that seemed to convince senators that there was something, some truth to the allegation that there is some...
You know, Chinese government involvement in the algorithm, perhaps behind the scenes.
That was the sort of thing where I thought, you know, if the government has that evidence, I would like to see it.
You know, I think that the American people are entitled to see it.
But that's not how it went.
Instead, we had the ban.
However, TikTok became highly useful for President Trump during the campaign.
And TikTok is deeply beloved by many, many millions of Americans.
And so all of a sudden, this opportunity to become the savior of TikTok presented itself.
And the CEO, who is a very shrewd businessman, of course, chose to use flattery, which has been evidenced to work with this particular president, chose to use flattery and to frame Trump as the savior of TikTok.
And so there were a number of, when you opened up the app for the 14 hours or so that it was down, interstitials that would let you know that Trump was going to save TikTok.
Just wait for it.
The team was working diligently with President Trump to save TikTok.
The ban was temporarily lifted.
I think Oracle began to serve TikTok content again.
I believe it's still out of the app stores because there are very hefty financial fines.
But Oracle began to serve the content again in response to a purported guarantee from Trump not to enforce.
And in response, you had this very glowing message, thanking President Trump again.
And of course, showing up to the inauguration is a...
You know, it's a calculated move.
These are businessmen to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate, to align with political interests during this time, which for them is an existential time of a very heightened scrutiny.
So I think that's how we should read this.
Less about genuine dialogue and shifting, perhaps.
More about optics signaling a willingness to play ball.
But again, past a certain point...
The optics become the reality.
You can't just say, oh, I'm just doing this to be showy, because what we've seen from users of TikTok is a deep distrust in response.
Left-wing, I should say, left-leaning users of TikTok is now a deep distrust, wondering if the platform is going to kowtow and capitulate to moderation and curation calls that the Trump administration wants them to make.
So, like so much these days, all of this is very demoralizing.
I've been talking to Renee for a few years now.
This is the third time that I've had this kind of conversation with her for the podcast.
She's been working on studying academically and writing about trying to remedy the digital disinformation crisis for almost a decade.
And my impression was that by 2022, she and her colleagues had really made significant headway.
But then all of that was turned upside down with threats and smears and the discrediting sort of fake expose of the Twitter files and then the sweeping information requests from an official government house committee.
And all of this was done in the name of being anti-censorship.
And pro-free speech, but very much from a right-wing perspective that was claiming the censorship industrial complex was a way of naming this conspiracy between university research facilities like the Stanford Internet Observatory that Rene was the head of, and big tech platforms, and the three-letter intelligence agencies of the government to somehow suppress conservative speech in unconstitutional ways.
During 2020, and, you know, leading over into 2021, but a lot of this was supposed to have been started under the Trump administration, which is, you know, just kind of beggar's belief.
But it also has to do with COVID, and it also has to do with vaccines.
And all of that is now massively setback, attempts to remedy that, attempts to understand how do we get a handle on this out-of-control disinformation crisis.
Not to mention the propaganda efforts from malign foreign actors.
It's all setback.
So I asked Renee, what are some of the negative downstream effects that she sees of anti-disinformation measures being shelved and being labeled as biased censorship?
We saw a phenomenal rhetorical propaganda campaign to redefine terms like censorship in ways that make no sense.
If you stop to think for even 30 seconds, the idea that a fact check is censorship is surreal, actually, because a fact check is adding more information.
The way that the platforms usually presented it was adjacent to the story.
You could see it.
Ironically, even in this sort of idealization of community notes, right, community notes is also adding more speech.
It's just implying that speech from ordinary people is more legitimate than speech from professional fact checkers.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
That, again, is a reflection.
I think what you'll see is...
That narrative, however, is using the word censorship as a thought-terminating cliche, right?
A way to make people just, oh, I hear that word, it's applied to something.
Well, censorship is bad and censors are bad and I don't support that because I support free speech, ergo that must be bad, right?
And so people stop thinking about what they're actually being asked to believe.
And it's been incredibly effective.
One of the ways that it manifested against us was with personal attacks, with threats, with smears.
We went through this very remarkable experience being subpoenaed and turning over tens of thousands of emails and documents and things.
And what I learned from that experience is that you can't exonerate yourself.
Nothing that you turn over actually exonerates you.
It is simply used in some way to, you know, that they will move the goalposts very subtly and then find evidence, you know, to make you guilty of the thing that they've moved the goalposts to.
You realize that what you're dealing with is the second coming of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
And that's how we should think about where our government has gone.
And so I think that, again, from a personal standpoint...
I do plan to continue fighting.
The capitulation that I'm seeing has really been more demoralizing and frustrating than anything I've personally experienced because I'm like, come on, guys.
You don't have to do this.
But the question of how, I think, is what really remains.
How do you convey to people?
How do you show them how the propaganda campaign works?
How do you say, like...
The fact checker is not actually biased against you.
You're being told that it is because that keeps you compliant.
And that is what is actually happening here.
It's a stark picture that Renee paints, but it's always great to talk to her because I find her to be a real inspiring portrait in courage, moral courage, and the willingness to keep doing the work.
So she has a new job.
I asked her what she's doing and what she sees as potentially hopeful for the future.
Yeah, so I am at Georgetown.
I'm at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Massive Data Institute there.
I am doing a ton of work actually on what I consider to be like future of internet design sort of things.
So I've been writing a lot about platforms like Blue Sky.
Which I think are some of the most technologically interesting things out there because they give users power, right?
Nobody is going to come and take over Blue Sky and say, okay, now we're going to moderate in this way because Blue Sky is architected from the ground up to be resistant to that sort of thing.
It has downsides, right?
You know, sometimes there have been figures who have come over, you know, Jesse Single pops over to the platform that really upsets some of the trans community there.
You know, at the same time, though, users are given the power to really control their own experience in incredibly granular ways to shift feeds, to shift moderation styles, to really build community from the ground up with algorithms that they have much more granular control over.
And so I'm spending a ton of time kind of in that research space.
How do we build a new and different internet, taking advantage of the decentralized protocol-based technology that we have now?
And then I'm looking at things like, you know, adjacent to AI. So there's really interesting work to be done when AI agents are increasingly autonomous.
How do we know when someone is human?
This is the notion of decentralized privacy protecting identity all of a sudden becomes, I think, the big sea change for people.
And so I'm interested in that question of not how do you keep bad bots and automation out, but how do you build spaces for actual human beings to engage and do human things?
Whether that's leaving political comments, banking, you name it.
We're going to need systems that take this into account.
And so those are the big areas that I'm working on right now.
I don't think it's too presumptuous to say that I will join you in thanking Renee for sharing her time and her insights with us.
Speaking of Blue Sky, you can find each of us, me and Matthew and Derek, there independently.
Collectively, we're still mostly on Instagram.
That's the main social media feed that we've used for the time this podcast has existed and we continue to be very active there.
Thank you so much for your time and for your support.
Please remember, if you would like to support our independent journalism even more, you can do so through patreon.com slash conspirituality.
