What Mark Zuckerberg’s New Misinfo Policy Means For Internet Freedom; The Disinformation Complex: Dismantled At Last?
Mark Zuckerberg announces that Meta will end its fact-checking policy: could it signal the end of the "disinformation" complex that has censored social media platforms for years? Plus: An overview of Meta's history of silencing Pro-Palestinian views.
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I hope all of you had a very sober and reflective insurrection day yesterday.
I know we did here.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, made an extraordinary announcement today on behalf of the two social media giants.
His company controls Facebook.
And Instagram, that announcement had many components, and all of them took direct aim at the censorship industrial complex that was created by governments and funded by neoliberal billionaires after 2016 in order to control political speech on the Internet.
The newly announced policy is also a bomb that was placed and then detonated at the heart of the fraudulent industry that calls itself disinformation experts.
People who have somehow proclaimed that they are uniquely able to discern truth and falsity with such authoritativeness, such certainty, that their decrees must define the limits of permissible speech online by others.
Now, we can and absolutely should question the motives behind Zuckerberg's announcement, and we will definitely do that tonight.
One can also be skeptical of whether it really is as striking a blow for online free speech as it might seem, and we will, of course, express that kind of skepticism as well, not just tonight, but on an ongoing basis.
But the speech itself, regardless of what follows it, was extremely consequential, just in and of itself.
Not just in the US, but internationally.
Zuckerberg, who has hinted at all of this before, long before Trump was elected, explicitly accused disinformation experts of acting for politicized ends, thus rendering them entirely unreliable.
As a result, he announced that Meta would no longer pay for or use their services to determine what speech should and should not be permitted on the platform.
He also acknowledged that the censorship policies of Facebook and Instagram have become wildly excessive and even repressive and thus vowed to abandon platform-wide censorship in favor of the model used by X of allowing the community to correct inaccurate claims while leaving up those claims without censoring them.
He also accused governments around the world, not only the United States, but governments throughout Europe and in Latin America, including Brazil, of increasing their tyrannical control over the Internet and political debate that takes place on it.
And he vowed that Mehta would no longer collaborate with these state censorship efforts.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Zuckerberg recognized that it is not the role or responsibility of social media platforms, nor is it their competence, nor is it anyone else's.
To determine what is true and what is false to the point where people who decree that have the right to have their decrees honored as censorship orders.
The whole point of free discourse for adults, after all, is to allow other people to debate those questions themselves freely and then decide for themselves.
Now, to say that Zuckerberg's announcement...
Generated fear and rage and hysteria and neurotic warnings is to severely understate the case.
Governments in the democratic world which increasingly rely on state-controlled political speech were apoplectic.
Even more unhinged were the self-proclaimed disinformation experts and highly financed groups whose entire purpose for being was negated, denied by Zuckerberg, who not significantly also announced that their gravy train from Meta would come to an end when he said that Facebook would no longer pay for their services.
Now, again, there are all sorts of reasons to distrust Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.
Facebook has often engaged in the exact kind of abuses that their CEO, less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated, vocally condemned today.
But there is no question that Zuckerberg's major announcement is a reflection of the growing backlash against online censorship and the fraudulent disinformation expert industry on which it relies.
And for that reason, not just the speech and not just the new meta-policy, but also the reactions to them are well worth examining in detail.
And we will do all of that.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Online censorship of political speech has become so pervasive in so many sectors, in so many countries, exercised in so many different ways that it might sometimes seem like it's been an endemic part of the internet from its inception.
That, however, would be an untrue assumption.
Back in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was first born in a popularized way, there was, of course, a concern and a recognition of the danger.
That states and other power centers would try and commandeer it in order to control political speech on it.
And a variety of phrases emerged out of the demand that the Internet remain free, such as keep your hands off the Internet, the Internet must be free, information is free.
That was part of the activism surrounding the Internet and the recognition of the Internet as a major historic once in a century, if not more, innovation was precisely that it would enable human beings to communicate freely.
With one another, without the intervention or control of the state or other corporate power centers, without that freedom, the Internet would actually be not just a neutral development, it would be a negative one, since it would be an unprecedented means of control and coercion and propaganda if states could actually control it, convert it into a propaganda outlet or a censorship regime or a way of monitoring citizens.
And for a long time, the Internet really was more or less free.
There are, of course, some exceptions.
But up until 2016, the idea that it was the responsibility of big tech platforms to censor political speech was more or less unheard of.
In fact, Congress had enacted back in the 2000s a law called Section 230 that was explicitly designed to shield those big tech companies from being held responsible legally for any content that was posted on their platforms based on the recognition that the Internet would be destroyed, social media would be suffocated, before it began if social media companies were responsible for monitoring everything that was posted on there and then censoring things that were untrue or harmful.
It was really only after 2016 when these dual traumas took place in the West and really traumatized Western liberals.
First was the British people's decision to leave the EU despite all of the European elites telling them that it was not in their interest.
They ignored those people and they voted for the UK to leave the EU. And then four months later, in a huge shock to everybody pretty much, Donald Trump...
Rolled over Hillary Clinton and won the Electoral College and became President of the United States.
And it was really then and only then that the idea emerged in a serious systemic way that free speech could no longer be tolerated on the internet because if it is, then the population can no longer be controlled.
Power centers can't control any longer what people think and therefore can't control their behavior, including their voting behavior.
And only then did you start to see all of the mechanics being created to justify censorship over the Internet as something more noble.
Obviously, they couldn't come right out and say, we have to censor political speech on the Internet because we fear free speech and what people will do and think if we can't control the information they're getting.
So they justified it instead with these fraudulently noble-sounding terms like disinformation.
Anti-misinformation, countering digital hatred on the internet, all sorts of noble or even generic sounding objectives that were nothing other than political censorship masquerading as something else.
And that was when all of these groups emerged that had never existed before, that were extremely well-financed.
By U.S. intelligence agencies, other Western intelligence agencies, the same set of neoliberal billionaires like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar and George Soros.
This huge industry emerged overnight.
And it was all justified based on this completely fabricated, concocted expertise where we were suddenly told that somehow there was a group of people who overnight had become qualified, had a credential, To go around decreeing what is true and what is false.
Differentiating truth from falsity.
Not just in their one trained area of expertise.
For example, if you're talking about cardiology and then a cardiologist comes and says that's not true.
That wasn't what we were talking about.
Even within very trained...
Specific fields of highly specialized knowledge.
People disagree all the time.
Even there, you couldn't have a floating arbiter of truth.
But that's not even what this was.
This was something much more ambitious, much more audacious, much more flagrantly fraudulent, which is the idea that there are certain groups of people who are just trained in the art of disinformation generally.
They can identify disinformation in any field of discipline with so much reliability and so much certainty.
That once they decree something to be disinformation, not only should people distrust it, but it ought to be banished from the internet entirely.
And ever since 2016, there has been this growing industry.
And it would be bad enough if there were just an industry well-financed and financed by states and by billionaires.
But the problem has become far worse than that because these industries are...
Tied at the hip to governments.
Governments use these agencies when they want to politically censor and then justify it by saying, we're not censoring for political ends.
Oh, no.
Parish thought.
There's just scholars over here who have decreed this information to be disinformation.
And who benefits from disinformation?
Nobody.
It's in everyone's interest for us to banish that.
And that's dangerous in and of itself, even if it's exercised in the best faith and most reliable way.
But of course, that's not what happened.
So many, not just debatable claims, but true claims ended up being censored because they were politically inconvenient to these groups that had a political agenda and still do, and therefore declared it to be disinformation, even though so often it ended up being true.
COVID was probably the most blatant example where from the very beginning, experts decreed based on nothing.
That they knew for certain that the origin of the COVID virus was not a leak from the Wuhan lab.
That was disinformation.
Instead, we were told that it was proven in January of 2020, in February of 2020, right when the pandemic emerged, that they knew for certain that it had jumped species.
It was zoonotic.
And therefore it was banished on the internet, prohibited to question whether or not it came from a lab because that was decreed to be disinformation.
Only four or four years later, major governments around the world, including major parts of the U.S. government, to believe and to have opined that it's far more likely than not that the COVID virus actually escaped from the Wuhan lab rather than it was a naturally occurring virus in nature.
These were the same groups of people who said the Hunter Biden laptop and reporting based on it was disinformation.
was disinformation Russian disinformation in particular, that ended up being a complete lie, and yet that reporting got censored based on the claim of disinformation.
This has happened over and over.
It is an incredibly threatening and repressive and authoritarian industry that has grown and grown and grown.
It suffered blows when certain social media platforms like this one that were on Rumble announced that it would refuse to take orders from this joint consortium of state and corporate power.
They said, we're going to let our adult viewers decide what this information is.
We're not going to dictate to people what they can and can't hear.
And then when Elon Musk bought X and laid the banner of free speech, even though he has not always been faithful, to put it mildly in the promises he made when he did, that was another blow for the idea that there was a growing backlash against online censorship.
And I would suggest that today...
With Mark Zuckerberg's announcement about new policies enacted by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, the announcement not just in and of itself of a new policy, but what it was that he said and how he said it.
He put himself in front of a camera not just to announce the policy, but to argue quite forcefully and sometimes even aggressively.
In defense of the idea that the internet should be free, that it should no longer be dictated by disinformation experts, admitting that Facebook and Instagram have often themselves been quite repressive in the kinds of political censorship to which they acquiesced or even imposed, and issued a series of new policies to cut off Facebook and Instagram from this disinformation industry.
Even if none of that ends up happening, even if he follows through on none of that, the mere argument he advanced, the recognition he expressed, the attacks on the disinformation expert industry that he endorsed, all of that is extremely significant.
And the people who know that best are the states that increasingly rely on political censorship and especially the disinformation experts.
That fraudulent industry.
That has made so much money and has acquired so much power that sees just how threatening and menacing this announcement is.
And to say that they're in hysterics over it really does dramatically understate the case.
So we definitely want to delve into the context for what happened, the implications of it, the reactions of it, the possible consequences.
But before we do, we want to make sure that you have a very good understanding of exactly what it is that Mark Zuckerberg said, what he announced.
The holes in some of the claims that were intended to appear to be absolute in its proclamation of the importance of free speech.
And so I think it's really worth only about five minutes breaking it up into a few different segments so we can talk about everything that he said, how he said it.
So here he is on the screen.
You see him there.
He has his new branding appearance with his frizzy hair and he wears jeans and he appears only in...
Sweatshirts, part of his new, more relatable, more likable Mark Zuckerberg that he and others seem to think is working.
Instead of that highly robotic appearance that we've all become accustomed to, and this is how he appears now.
And here he was on camera, not in a very formal setting at all in sort of this.
It almost looks like a hostage video.
It's in front of a kind of faux brick wooden wall.
But here is...
What it is that he said.
And we'll look at this first part here.
Hey everyone.
I want to talk about something important today.
Because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
I started building social media to give people a voice.
I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression.
And I still believe this today.
But a lot has happened over the last several years.
There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content.
Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.
Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.
These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people.
And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
Now, just as a side, he has this very ennobling mythological story about how he founded Facebook and why.
He said, I founded it to give people a voice.
As you might recall, he was in Harvard and he basically created Facebook to enable fellow frat members to rate whether they found particular women in college, hot or not.
And it kind of turned into this massive platform.
He also says that about five years ago, he gave a speech at Georgetown.
In which he emphasized the urgency, the importance, supreme importance of free speech on the Internet, that would be about January of 2020, five years ago.
And of course, in November of 2020, both Twitter and Facebook engaged in some of the most historically significant and unjustifiable political censorship in American history when they both decided to block.
critical reporting about Joe Biden and his family's activities and trying to profit in China and Ukraine just weeks before the 2020 election based on the CIA's claim that that information was Russian disinformation, which turned out to be false.
It was also Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook that just a couple of weeks after that election in January of 2021, banded together with other social media platforms to ban the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, from using that platform, something that horrified and shocked even a lot of Donald Trump's something that horrified and shocked even a lot of Donald Trump's most vocal critics in the international community, world leaders, said you can't have social media companies silencing elected
So Mark Zuckerberg's Reference to his past, to his belief system, as I said, is highly questionable.
But the fact that he's saying here that the censorship framework has gotten completely out of hand, there's too much censorship, and it's time to correct that going back to our roots of free internet, that in and of itself, that acknowledgement, that admission, that confession, is really, I think, a turning point in this debate.
Now, it's not Mark Zuckerberg doing it.
He even admits there.
That, in part, the reason he's doing it is because of the results of the 2024 election.
And the criticism has been, mostly, that social media companies are censoring too much, and particularly they're censoring conservative speech, and obviously Donald Trump coming into office with an army of people who believe that makes it very difficult for people like Mark Zuckerberg to continue to censor given the perception, even though it's not always the case.
It's not the case.
That generally that censorship is directed at conservative voices.
It is often directed at conservative voices.
But not only that, but obviously if you're Mark Zuckerberg and you now have a new president coming in with a wildly different set of beliefs on questions like internet censorship, you're going to want to try and position your company, which relies on the federal government for all sorts of things, to appease and placate the new administration.
He basically admits that.
That is Donald Trump's victory that signals the backlash against censorship.
But again, Skepticism of Mark Zuckerberg aside, the announcements itself and the arguments he harnesses in order to justify them are going to be very long-lasting.
Let's look at the next segment of what he says here.
First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S. Now, But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S.
So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
Now, again, I'm not going to keep pointing it out.
The fact that Zuckerberg and Meta and Facebook in particular have often been leaders in the exact kind of censorship and arbitrating truth that he or he is denouncing.
The much more significant part of this excerpt in particular, and I think it's the most important part of his announcement in general, is not only that Facebook is getting rid of fact-checkers, meaning the media outlets and the...
Think tank groups and the organizations that believe that they are and they alone are competent to dictate what the truth is.
Facebook is no longer going to use those groups, no longer is going to use those outside media outlets or organizations to dictate what truth is.
Instead, they're going to basically copy the innovation of Elon Musk and Axe to rely upon community notes where the statement that people dislike remains.
And everyone can read it, but there's also a note under it that is the byproduct of community consensus about why it's out of context or inaccurate or wrong, which is obviously, so obviously, the most democratic way to conduct political discussion.
He also, in that excerpt, really fully frontally assaulted The disinformation experts who rely on this sanctimonious image of high integrity and nobility, it's the only way they can justify their role, is by saying, we have no political agenda.
We're not interested in politics.
We're interested in truth.
We're scientists.
We're scholars.
And obviously, Mark Zuckerberg has dealt with these people a lot.
And he has concluded and then said today that these people are basically just political actors abusing the authority that they've claimed for themselves.
And for that critique to come from him, a head of a company that has probably done more than anyone to fuel this industry, to give them power and money, clearly signifies a major turning of the tides when it comes to this entire debate.
Now, here's the next segment.
Let's take a look at that.
We're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas and it's gone too far.
So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
I'm kind of divided on that excerpt because he's saying we're going to eliminate restrictions around the debates over immigration and gender.
And you can pretty much assume that all he's doing is changing Facebook's policy to accommodate what he now perceives to be prevailing public opinion.
Back in 2018, in the wake of Me Too, back in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protest movement and then the election of Joe Biden, It seemed as though people had sided with the liberal consensus on these issues.
So it was very easy, and Facebook did it, to ban race-based critiques of open borders, saying we only want white people in the country, we don't think these groups of people can assimilate well.
That was all banned, and now it's going to be unbanned.
And then on gender, one presumes that it has everything to do with the debate around transgender people.
And whether you can misgender them, which have been banned on Facebook, whether you can make arguments about the dangers gender ideology poses, these are examples that are pretty easy in light of the victory of Donald Trump and his movement to just accommodate power.
And if that's all this is, if there's only going to be a loosening of censorship when it comes to the easy issues...
Where he knows that the people in power won't tolerate him suppressing speech of that kind, but there's still going to be censorship in accordance with the agenda of the people in power.
It's not really a step forward in terms of policy.
So what that remains to be seen, whether or not this is actually going to be a waving of the banner of free speech.
I should also point out that Facebook has a long history of censoring in accordance with what they perceive to be This is the most amazing example.
And we've reported on this several times before and documented it.
Up until January of 2022, Facebook had a policy that formally classified the Azov Battalion as a hate group.
And it was prohibited on Facebook to say anything positive about or let alone express support for or praise of.
The Azov battalion, because it had been declared to be a neo-Nazi group and Facebook's rules against expressing support for neo-Nazism included Azov.
Soon as Russia invaded Ukraine and the West rallied behind Ukraine and relied upon Azov fighters as their most important, most experienced, most well-trained fighters, Facebook instantly abandoned that policy.
And said, oh, from now on, you're free to praise Azov.
They're no longer considered to be a hate group.
Very similar to how the United States government had characterized its terrorist groups.
The groups that just took over in Syria had offered a $10 million reward for the new Syrian leader, and then it instantly withdrew that when it became convenient for them.
So Facebook has a history of saying, we're going to censor speech that we think is unpopular, but the minute we see it's popular, we're going to allow it.
But given everything else Zuckerberg said here, he has at least created a lot of pressure on himself to make sure that he's adhering to what he announced here.
And I think any type of political censorship that Facebook engages in the future, his critics are going to have a lot of ammunition, just like people do with Elon Musk, who came out and said, I'm buying Twitter, I'm a free speech absolutist, I'm going to ensure free speech absolutism prevails.
I define that as being all speech unless it's illegal.
And whenever he censors...
Political speech that is not illegal, as he does often now, and has several times before that.
People have a lot of ammunition to say you're violating your own commitment.
That's what Mark Zuckerberg, at the very worst, has done here as well.
All right, let's look at the next excerpt.
We're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.
We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.
Now we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations.
And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.
The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't.
So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.
The reality is that this is a trade-off.
It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
Now, that is the balance that every free country has struck.
Obviously, the founders, when they guaranteed free speech, understood that by doing so, there was going to be a lot of ideas that would be expressed that were dangerous, had the potential to cause harm.
Same with the free press.
Same with freedom of religion, allowing all sorts of religions, even very toxic and harmful ones, to be practiced because the government has no right to interfere.
If you say the police can't invade people's homes without a search warrant, on some level, in some cases, you're going to make it easier for criminals to get away because the police can't just do whatever they want.
It's a restraint on police, recognizing that it might have some bad consequences, but the freedom is worth it.
That is the framework of every endorsement of freedom, which is we've been erring on the side of safety.
We've been erring on the side of not allowing any potential speech that might be threatening.
We're going to dial that back.
We're going to significantly restrain that.
And yes, we acknowledge that that will result in some, quote, bad things being posted.
But the danger of allowing free speech, of allowing some bad things to be said, is a far less danger, a far less threatening policy than having a centralized policy of censoring, including where a far less threatening policy than having a centralized policy of censoring, including where you rely on automation and errors on the side of censoring, knowing that a huge number of people who have said nothing wrong will end up being
That is a ringing endorsement of the foundational view of how liberties, including free speech, operate.
Let's look at the next excerpt.
Fourth, we're bringing back civic content.
For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed.
So we stopped recommending these posts.
But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.
So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
I guess I forgot to mention when I was listening to the social media platforms that Meta controls Threads.
In case you are interested in that or know what that is, it was sort of intended to be an apolitical alternative to Twitter.
And that really has been Metta's policy is to depoliticize Instagram, Facebook, and threads to prioritize cultural content or just general socializing and sharing of ideas that are non-political in nature.
And that's just not what people want.
That's not what they're looking for any longer.
And he has a recognition that that's the case.
And he probably cannot have good relationships with the Trump administration if he's deliberately suppressing political content.
So again, every one of these rules is designed to dilute censorship, weaken the control of the sectors that have seized control of political speech on the Internet, and to allow more vibrant and free discussion.
Let's look at the next outro.
Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas.
As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world, they're going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government.
And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.
By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.
It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems.
They're never going to be perfect.
There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
I'm looking forward to this next chapter.
Stay good out there, and more to come soon.
Stay good out there.
Now, there's a lot of really meaty components to that excerpt that I want to delve into.
I just have to say, though, this initial announcement of that excerpt of we're going to move from California to Texas, we're going to move our content moderation there, it's almost cringeworthy and it really reflects the kind of inauthentic lack of conviction behind everything Zuckerberg is doing.
This is what Elon Musk did with SpaceX.
It's what Joe Rogan did.
And a bunch of people who follow Joe Rogan were going to leave California.
It's too left-wing.
It's too liberal.
It's too reliant on censorship.
We're going to move to Texas, the land of the free.
And now you see Mark Zuckerberg copying that just less than two weeks before Donald Trump is going to take office.
He's being extremely transparent about what he's saying.
But the vision that he laid out...
of governments around the world, particularly in Europe and Latin America, and not only Latin America in general, but Brazil in particular, the largest country on the continent, that they are engaged in a unified effort to force American companies to adopt a view of censorship that is deeply un-American, that is deeply repressive.
By threatening them that they will not be allowed to operate in those countries unless they censor in accordance with those governments' demands, that is a major recognition, and it has created huge repercussions in Europe and Brazil, because he took direct aim at those countries.
He didn't actually name Brazil.
He said censorship orders that are being issued by secret order by courts in Latin America, but everyone in Brazil understood that to mean only one country, which is Brazil.
We were actually the first one to report, to acquire and report on the censorship orders that came from Brazil's Supreme Court that are done in complete secrecy.
No notice whatsoever to the person who's being censored.
No opportunity for them to object.
The censorship orders are sent directly to the social media companies.
There's no rationale or explanation provided, just an order that they are required to take down posts or to ban people, including elected officials.
And if they don't do it within two hours, they face massive fines.
And then the last part of the order says, you are required to keep this order a secret.
So that's what he was talking about with Brazil.
And then anyone who watches this show understands what he means in Europe with the Digital Services Act by the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, this whole panoply of efforts in Canada, too, to create a legislative framework.
That allows the state to force social media companies to politically censor on their behalf.
He's declaring war on that.
Much like Rumble did and followed through with it, which is why Rumble is not available in places like Brazil or France.
Much like Elon Musk vowed to do as well to wage war on this international censorship framework, although he's back down on several occasions, including when he got banned in Brazil and then promised to follow censorship orders.
The announcement that he intended to fight against it certainly brought a lot of positive attention to this issue.
But for Zuckerberg to now weigh in with Instagram, Facebook, threads, and WhatsApp all owned and controlled by his company, proclaiming war on the European and Brazilian attempt to unite to create a censorship structure over the Internet and force big tech companies to obey and to vow that he will...
Work with President Trump to prevent that effort from succeeding.
That is a very serious announcement.
It's basically a declaration of war against the EU and Brazil in their escalating efforts to constantly censor.
Now, again, obviously a lot of this is about appeasing Donald Trump and currying favor with him.
The last heard of his little speech there.
Was designed to blame Joe Biden to say the current administration of the last four years has been deeply unhelpful, has been on the side of censorship, has often centered and pressured big tech companies to censor for themselves, which of course is the truth.
And he says now with the arrival of Donald Trump, the champion of freedom, we have a chance to fight for these values that we all believe in.
This is so transparent in its attempt to flatter Donald Trump and win favor with the U.S. government because these big tech companies need the U.S. government in so many ways.
But again, who cares at the end of the day what the motive is?
Who cares how much Mark Zuckerberg in the past has engaged in the precise behavior that he's now so pompously condemning?
It would be great if he had been a lifelong opponent of the censorship effort.
It would be great if he were somebody who really seemed like he had a lot of convictions.
And I don't want to be too cynical based on things I know, based on people I know who know him, who have talked to him.
It does seem to be at least partially genuine that he has been growing increasingly concerned about and angry about, especially the COVID-era attempts by the U.S. government to force Facebook to censor a whole variety of claims that, in his words, ended up being debatable or even true.
He also has been growing, he also has had growing anger at U.S. media companies like the New York Times and CNN. To try and threaten Facebook's reputation by saying you will have blood in your hands if you don't remove these posts, or saying why is Facebook allowing this bad person and this bad idea, implying that Facebook is responsible for all sorts of violence in the world or tyranny in the world because they don't censor enough.
These are genuine sentiments that he seems to not just express in public but in private.
But at the end of the day, he's proven himself an unreliable actor, but that should not detract from...
How significant and potentially valuable this announcement is.
One of the people who's highly cynical about what Mark Zuckerberg has done and who has made no qualms about the fact that he thinks it's being done only to create favor with Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
He was asked earlier today about what he thinks about Mark Zuckerberg's announcement and Metta's new policy, and here's what he had to say.
I think they've come a long way, Metta.
Facebook.
I think they've come a long way.
I watched it.
The man was very impressive.
Actually, I watched it on Fox.
I'm not allowed to say that.
Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?
Probably.
The last time you were here, you were asked a question about the U.S. All right, so there he kind of is.
It's a very Trumpian statement.
He's saying, yeah, they probably did it because they were afraid of me.
And he did it to please me, but he also gave them a head pat because he's saying this is a positive thing.
Now, again, part of the problem, and we've covered this a lot, not with respect to Trump per se, but with respect to a lot of his movement, is that they've demonstrated anger and rage about censorship when it's been directed at them and their ideas, and either acquiescence to or even active support for censorship when directed at people who they most disagree with.
There's been a spate of...
Censorship efforts at Israel critics or pro-Palestinian activists that many, by no means all, but many people on the pro-Trump right have actually cheered.
And there's no opposition or resistance to that kind of censorship in the Trump administration or in the Trump movement.
There's some, but not much.
And so whether this is only an effort To tamp down on censorship that infuriates and angers Trump and his allies, or whether it's really an attempt to re-establish free speech as the defining value of the Internet, is something that remains to be seen.
Just a little bit more evidence that Mark Zuckerberg has, even prior to this announcement, been scheming to make sure that he stays in the good graces of Donald Trump.
Financial Times on January 2nd announces Meta Global Affairs Chief Nick Clegg is to be replaced by Republican Joel Kaplan.
So this global affairs chief is a very important position in Facebook.
It is essentially the liaison between Facebook and governments.
Nick Clegg is a sort of a very pro-establishment, I guess you could say center-left, longtime British politician.
He was the head of the Liberal Democrats Party in the UK. And when Obama was...
In office, they hired him away and put him in this position because these were the kinds of governments that dominated in the West.
These sort of very pro-establishment, Obama-type, center-left governments.
And now with Donald Trump coming in, no need for Nick Clegg any longer.
He's not very welcome in the Trump White House.
Instead, they have this hardcore Trump supporter and conservative, Joel Kaplan, who has taken that position as well.
Obviously, again, trying to appease Donald Trump.
Here from the New York Times today.
Who is Joel Kaplan, Meta's new global policy chief?
Quote, the longtime Republican lobbyist for Meta was named to the company's top policy role last week.
Now, one of the things we're going to show you in just a little bit is that one of the things Joel Kaplan has done when working at Facebook over the past many years is he was the primary liaison between Facebook and the Israeli government to work with the Israeli government to make certain that Israel's demands for censorship were honored.
So it is hard to be very credulous about, put a lot of credence into Mark Zuckerberg's newfound identity as a free speech advocate.
But again, the speech itself, I think, is quite promising.
Now, just one last point about Facebook and how transparent their motives here are from the AP today.
Meta announces a new board member.
It includes the UFC boss Dana White, a familiar figure in Trump's orbit.
Dana White is one of the closest allies of Donald Trump.
Trump specifically thanked him and gave him a lot of credit on the night that he declared victory in the 2024 election.
And Facebook sees the writing on the wall, and they take a close Trump friend and ally, Dana White, and put him on the board.
Now, that said, Dana White also seems to be a very genuine free speech advocate, just as a principle.
I've seen him many times just react off the cuff without a script.
To suggestions that he ought to censor or in some way impose rules on what his fighters can say.
He just reacts with so much anger at the idea that people's political expressions should be limited in any way.
So it could be promising for that reason.
Now, the reaction to Zuckerberg's announcement was particularly hysterical and unhinged and full of sadness and fear and rage.
On the part of the very groups that have been so empowered since the emergence of this disinformation scheme in the wake of the 2016 election.
Obviously, Mark Zuckerberg just got done saying they're worthless.
They're worse than worthless.
They're frauds.
They operate with political motives and what they declare to be truth or false.
And Facebook is cutting off, Meta is cutting off, the gravy train of money that has gone to them.
Imagine.
I know several people who work in and with these groups around the world.
And the meltdown that is taking place in the wake of this announcement that kind of came as a surprise inside these disinformation groups is beyond entertaining to observe, but also highly significant about how threatened they are by it.
Here from the New York Times, today, tech watchdogs warn that Metta's decision could cause a surge in disinformation.
If we don't allow these people to censor the Internet, we're going to be drowning in disinformation.
They protect us from disinformation.
While Republicans largely cheered Meta's announcement on Tuesday that it would effectively end its fact-checking program, several tech watchdog groups condemned the decision, warning of the potential for a surge in disinformation.
Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, said in a statement that the decision was a gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world.
Meta, she cautioned, was inviting, quote, the exact same surge of hate, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that fueled the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, said in a statement that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, is, quote, saying yes to more lies, yes to more harassment, yes to more hate.
While Zuckerberg characterized the platform's giant's new approach as a defensive free speech, its real intentions are twofold.
Ditch the technology company's responsibility to protect the health and safety of its users and align the company more closely with an incoming president who's a known enemy of accountability, Ms. Benavidez said.
Valerie Werfschefter, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, said that Meta should have continued to build on its fact-checking resources, adding crowdsourced content to existing practices.
As they stand, Meta's changes are, quote, likely to make the information environment worse, she said.
Note two things there.
Number one, the cause of free speech of weakening censorship controls is immediately characterized as a far-right extremist view.
Free speech is now coded as a fascist value.
And these people who are the true authoritarians who want to control the internet immediately accuse others of trying to foster authoritarianism and extremism because they're saying, I think, individuals around the world should be free to express their political ideas without being banished or punished by centralized authorities for doing so.
It's so Orwellian and inverse.
But the other aspect is that they really do believe, obviously it's part of their necessary propaganda, but I believe they really do believe that somehow these people who have called themselves disinformation experts or anti-misinformation combatants or whatever, they really do believe that somehow they have been chosen by some divine force.
Imagine believing that you are uniquely capable of recognizing truth.
Not just to the point where you have confidence in your own opinions.
Most people do.
That's why we adopt them.
So much confidence in your ability to decree truth and falsity that you want the biggest tech companies in the world, the major social media platforms where most people now go to get their news and information and ideas and express their thoughts and organize politically.
you believe that your assessment of what is true should be so binding that nobody should be permitted to question it, let alone deviate from it.
It's just hubris in its highest form.
And these people have this sanctimony so deeply embedded in them.
That's why they're so angry.
Hard to know whether this is satire or not, but it's a real headline that appeared in the New York Times today in response to this Zuckerberg announcement.
Amen.
Okay.
And it was written by Stuart Thompson, who may be familiar to viewers because that was the same New York Times reporter.
He recently wrote a major article on Rumble.
You may recall that he said that he had this major journalistic commitment where he was going to only get his news from Rumble for an entire week.
He watched 47 hours of Rumble, he said.
His biography says he is a disinformation expert.
This guy who's been, according to him, paying attention to right-wing media for four years.
And he wrote a big article on how if you only get your informational rumble, you're going to end up drowning in disinformation.
So the fact that he's the author of this article strongly leads me to believe that it's actually quite sincere and not remotely satirical, even though it, for any normal person, if they wrote it, would be.
Here's the headline.
Meta says that fact-checkers were the problem.
Fact-checkers rule that.
False.
Fact-checkers rule it false to say that they're the problem or that there's anything wrong with them.
Quote, fact-checking groups that work with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
But obviously the whole reason they're hired is because if one of these fact-checking organizations declares something false and Facebook doesn't immediately take it down, the New York Times or CNN will run an article saying Facebook told that information is false yet leaves it up.
That's been the way in which the media has become the primary agitators and advocates for censorship.
Through that sort of constant attack on any company that doesn't instantly censor on command.
Hear from Barron's, also today, disinformation expert Slam met his decision to end U.S. fact-checking.
Now, I just want to stop here.
I just, honestly, I know I've said this before, but I really, I just, I honestly can't believe it sometimes, even though I've talked about it before.
That media outlets have now decided to start earnestly calling people disinformation experts.
It's a completely made-up credential.
There's no school that you can go to, there's no training you can undergo that justifies your calling yourself this.
As I said, obviously, there are people with specialized knowledge.
If there's a question about aviation, I'm more likely to listen to a lifelong trained pilot than I am some random person off the street.
Although even there, again, I recognize that just because somebody is credentialed doesn't mean their positions are authoritative.
It was very credentialed scientists who said that we know for certain the origins of COVID even though they didn't.
They lie constantly.
But at least there, there's a basis for claiming that you know more than other people, namely that you studied something for a long time.
Here, these people don't only pronounce on areas of knowledge that they have specialized study in.
They just think that they're floating arbiters of the truth and other media outlets have adopted this and say it.
With a straight face.
Disinformation experts say this.
Disinformation experts do that.
Surprise!
Disinformation experts are slamming Meta's decision to distance themselves from disinformation experts.
Quote, I'm amazed that there really are people who think that society cannot function, that people cannot be protected unless they're empowered to decide what can and can't be said on the Internet.
Now, as skeptical as I am about Mark Zuckerberg's motives and all of that for the reasons I said, although I also have said that there's reason to believe there's some authentic opponent to it, I think you could say that it's motivated by personal views that he has developed over time, but he never would have announced it as the CEO of Meta had it not been for the political climate changing and the benefits he gets from doing so.
Leave that aside.
Even before Donald Trump was elected, Mark Zuckerberg has been Not quite as explicitly as today, but expressing irritation toward even warning about the dangers of the state industrial coalition, consortium that has been censoring the Internet.
Back in August of 2024, PBS News reported Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to, quote, censor some COVID-19 content during the pandemic, something that we obviously know from the Twitter files and from court cases.
Here is what Mark Zuckerberg had said back in September of 2023 that I talked about a lot when it happened.
I've referred to it since many times because this was actually quite an emphatic statement.
He was talking to the utterly vacant and banal Lex Friedman, and this is what he said.
So misinformation, I think, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are kind of obviously false, right, that are maybe factual, but may not be harmful. but may not be harmful.
But I think it's a really good thing.
Since, like, all right, are you going to censor someone for just being wrong?
If there's no kind of harm implication of what they're doing, I think that there's a bunch of real kind of issues and challenges there.
But then, I think that there are other places where it is...
Take some of the stuff around COVID earlier on in the pandemic, where there were real health implications, but there hadn't been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being more debatable or true.
And that stuff is really tough and really undermines trust in that.
So that was a very significant confession that the U.S. government wasn't just pressuring Facebook to remove dissent on COVID, which is bad enough.
A lot of what they were demanding be removed, said Mark Zuckerberg, were views that turned out to either be debatable or to be outright false.
Or outright true, rather.
They were censoring true statements about COVID. The only thing worse than censoring dissenting political speech on the grounds of disinformation is to censor speech that's actually expressing truthful, accurate ideas.
And Zuckerberg, back in 2023, before anyone knew what the outcome of the 2024 election was, obviously...
Was pretty emphatically and publicly complaining about the Biden administration's pressure, incessant pressure on Facebook to censor.
And we saw that from the Twitter files as well.
Now, just to underscore how implicated Mark Zuckerberg has been in this censorship scheme, on January 7th, 2021, the day after the event that Sonny Hostin of The View said was Dance about to the Holocaust and slavery, which is a three-hour riot on January 6th.
Zuckerberg said the following on Facebook, quote, about January 6th, quote, We have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies.
But the current context is now fundamentally different.
We believe the risk of allowing the president to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.
Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely.
Hard to trust somebody or take them seriously when they were saying that not 30 years ago and not 15 years ago, but four years ago.
Soon as the pressure got a little too high, And everybody was demanding that they take down Trump's account and prevent him from speaking.
And then they instantly did that.
And Mark Zuckerberg himself justified it as important to the public order.
Even worse, in my view, was what Facebook and Twitter did two weeks before the election.
Hear from Business Insider October 14th.
2020, Facebook and Twitter are choking the spread of a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden after questions arise about its veracity and a possible disinformation campaign.
Quote, Facebook is slowing the spread of a controversial New York Post article that reportedly references emails from Hunter Biden while Facebook's fact-checkers determine whether or not it's true.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said Wednesday Facebook is, quote, reducing the distribution of the New York Post article on its platforms while it's being fact-checked.
And then I believe we have the Andy Stone tweet.
And I think it's worth recalling here that Andy Stone, the person who came out on behalf of Facebook to announce...
That they were algorithmically suppressing this reporting on Joe Biden two weeks before the election.
Until there was a third-party Facebook, third-party fact-check to determine if the reporting was true.
Andy Stone was a lifelong Democratic Party operative.
He had worked for Barbara Boxer.
He had worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is intended to ensure a permanent majority for the Democratic Party in Dallas representatives.
Here is the tweet that Andy Stone posted, this lifelong Democratic operative, on behalf of Facebook.
Once the New York Post story about Joe Biden, based on information that turned out to be completely true, once it was published by the New York Post, here was Andy Stone and what he said.
Can we put this tweet on the screen?
He said, quote, There you see the tweet.
Can we put that tweet back up?
He's saying, just look at how snide this is.
Look at how snide this is.
While I'm intentionally not linked to that New York Post story, I won't even dignify it by acknowledging what it says.
It's eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners.
In other words, these very groups that Mark Zuckerberg is now admitting have been politically motivated all along will determine whether or not this reporting is true and therefore whether or not Americans can hear it.
In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform, meaning we're choking it.
We're going to prevent people from seeing it.
I've written to Andy Stone and to Facebook many times.
Asking, where is this third-party fact-checking about this story that you said was coming?
Because obviously, if there had been a fact-checking process about this story, it would have concluded that these documents on which the reporting based were in fact authentic and the reporting was true.
I don't think there was ever any fact-checking process.
The election was only two weeks away.
If there were, either it falsely concluded that the documents were fictitious or...
They told Facebook the reporting is based on accurate information and Facebook continued to choke it all the way up until the election.
Here is a New York Post story, the very first one, October 14th.
Smoking gun email reveals that how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessmen to his vice presidential dad.
I think there's been a lot of memory loss about what that reporting was and nothing to do with Hunter Biden's personal life.
It was about how Hunter Biden and his uncle were pursuing business deals in Ukraine and China by trading on Joe Biden's influence on the government and promising Joe Biden profit participation in it.
Obviously, provoking serious integrity concerns about Joe Biden, ethical concerns about Joe Biden.
He was running his campaign on decency.
And Facebook and Twitter, based on CIA lies, acted to suppress it.
And then, as I said, here is NPR. I believe that date should be, this is June 4th, 2021, after they suspended him and then they made it a, they said we're going to do a process and they ended up suspending Donald Trump for two years from the platform.
Now, I think the most important part of this story is the missile, the blow that it strikes.
Toward the disinformation industry.
There's been a lot of reporting about the disinformation industry.
And industry is really what it has become.
It's a censorship industrialized complex.
Back in 2021, Harper's Magazine by Joe Bernstein wrote one of the best stories on how this industry emerged.
It was entitled Bad News, Selling the Story of Disinformation.
And here's just a small part of what it said.
quote, big disinformation, big disinfo, has found the energetic support from the highest echelons of the American political center, which has been warning of an existential content crisis more or less constantly since the 2016 election.
To take only the most recent example, in May, Hillary Clinton told the former Tory leader, Lord Haig, that, quote, there must be a reckoning by the tech companies for the role that they play in undermining the information ecosystem that is absolutely essential for the functioning OF ANY DEMOCRACY, big tech agrees, compared with other more literally toxic corporate giants, those in the tech industry have been rather quick to concede the role they play in corrupting the allegedly pure stream of American reality.
Over five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said it was, quote, a pretty crazy idea that bad content on his website had persuaded enough voters to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
Quote, voters make decisions based on their lived experience, Zuckerberg said.
There's a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news.
A year later, suddenly chastened, he apologized for being glib and pledged to do his part to thwart those who, quote, spread disinformation.
That's what I mean.
Mark Zuckerberg mocked the idea after the 2016 election that people only voted for Donald Trump because they were deceived by disinformation to do so.
A very patronizing An insulting way to talk about the vast majority of voters if they voted the way you didn't want only because they're too stupid and were deceived.
And that's what he essentially said.
He said that's a reductive and ridiculous way of looking at it.
And the minute there was political pressure put on Facebook to institute anti-disinformation policies, Mark Zuckerberg immediately did that and Facebook became a vortex of political censorship.
Tablet Magazine and Jacob Siegel, who's a friend of the show, he's been on several times, also wrote a great article we had him on to talk about at the time.
And we've gone through this history many times.
A guide to understanding the hoax of the century.
Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation.
It traces the emergence of this disinformation industry.
Funded in large part by the U.S. government, quote, Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the world's most powerful forces in the modern world, a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a, quote, whole-of-society effort that aims to seize total control over the Internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.
So you can imagine why people who have acquired that power are so fearful and enraged of the fact that they might have to give that up.
Now, let me just show you a little bit about what this industry actually is and how they're reacting today.
First of all, here from Business Insider, fact-checkers at Meta call a, quote, emergency meeting after Mark Zuckerberg pulls the plug.
There's an emergency meeting because Meta will no longer fund and rely on the pronouncements of truth and falsity from these groups.
Quote, Meta's decision impacts the financial sustainability of fact-checking organizations.
The International Fact-Checking Network, The IFCN. You'd be forgiven if you didn't know there was such a thing.
Imagine proclaiming yourself to be a member of the International Fact-Checking Network.
They convened today an emergency meeting.
Ooh, an emergency meeting of its members following Meta's announcement on Tuesday that it will end its third-party fact-checking partnership in the U.S. and replace them with a crowdsource moderation tool similar to X's Community Notes.
In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, IFCN Director Angie Holin confirmed that the meeting schedule for Wednesday was organized in direct response to Meta's decision.
Quote, we hold these meetings monthly, but we call this one specifically because of today's news, she said.
How much would you pay to be able to watch the emergency meeting of these fact checkers who today were accused by Mark Zuckerberg, who used to be one of their biggest champions of being fraudulent political actors, told they would no longer get this flow of money and most importantly of all would lose the power to dictate on those platforms what can told they would no longer get this flow of money and most importantly of Imagine that to your whole purpose in life.
And out of nowhere with no warning this announcement comes, this attack on your purpose, your whole life mission is announced by one of the most powerful people on the internet in technology.
I don't blame them for having an emergency meetings.
Like I said, the reports I got from inside these organizations...
If you're a person with a lot of empathy for them, which I don't have, would make you kind of sad for them.
But if you don't have that empathy, if you think they're toxic influences and blights on a free discourse, as I do, you would find them extremely funny.
I was actually concerned for myself today that I might have an overload of schadenfreude hearing about all these people and the way in which they're reacting.
Now, if you wonder why this IFCN, this network of fact-checkers, It's so angry about and worried about the announcement that they were being cut off.
It's because they get a lot of funding from Meta.
Here is their own fundraising page where they say, we would like to thank all of our funders.
All donations greater than 5,000 pounds received are listed here along with the amount they gave and what it was given for.
And then their biggest donors are Google, where they got...
285 million euros.
They got...
Oh, sorry.
285,000 from Google.
They got 198,000 euros from Google.
And they got close to 300,000 from Facebook, their largest single donor.
And that was for third-party fact-checking and programming.
And now this is gone.
In one day, this is gone.
It's not only gone in the sense that they're not getting that money anymore, it's gone in the sense that their biggest source of revenue has said that they're basically a fraudulent service, that they're worthless, and that it's better to rely on the community to assess truth than for them to do, and obviously that's going to put pressure on their Google funding as well.
You may remember Nina Yankovic.
She was the ludicrous, preposterous cartoon of liberal resistance that the Biden Homeland Security Department tried to install as the disinformation czar inside the Department of Homeland Security.
Even for our censorship-happy culture, that was a bridge too far.
The controversy was intense.
Needless to say, she and her media allies, once the government had to force She was forced to reverse that decision, accused everybody of disinformation.
And then Nini Yankovic went and created her own disinformation project called the American Sunlight Project.
And she constantly refers to herself as a disinformation expert when she goes on CNN or when the New York Times talks about her.
She's referred to as a disinformation researcher.
She's a joke.
She's like, if you...
We're put in a room, dropped into a room of Rachel Maddow fans.
She would fit in perfectly.
She would not be remotely out of place.
That's who they wanted to make the disinformations are when she didn't get to be that.
She founded her own group that's now very well financed.
And talk about schadenfreude.
Here was her announcement, Nina Yankovic's statement in response to Meta eliminating fact checkers.
She put the statement on Blue Sky as well, which is where she, of course, went.
Quote, let's be clear.
The fact-checkers have not been politically biased, as Zuckerberg suggests.
Perish that thought.
Instead, we have been perceived as such because of politically motivated efforts to smear them, one that Zuck is now participating in and capitulating to.
Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism, and this will be the final nail in the coffin.
Newsrooms, especially outside the U.S., where subscription models are difficult sells, get grants from Facebook to provide fact checks.
So in other words, the media outlets that people no longer trust, that people have turned away from, that they no longer subscribe to, have been getting grants from Facebook to tell Facebook what is and isn't true.
And Nina Yankovic says, that money allows them to do other journalism.
Exclamation point.
She's really worked up over this.
The implications are going to be widespread, she says.
Fact-checking was not a panacea to disinformation on Facebook, but it was an important part of moderation.
Bumpers are fully off the lane now.
Here was CNN in mid-2022 when that whole debacle happened.
DHS shuts down Disinformation Board months after its efforts were paused.
Quote Nina Yankovic.
What is her credential?
What is her job?
She's the disinformation expert, says CNN. Nini Yankovic, the disinformation expert with experience working on Ukraine and Russia issues.
I'm sorry for my mockery.
She is a disinformation expert.
After all, she has experience working on Russia and Ukraine issues.
Resigned in May after Homeland Security paused the board.
Her appointment had quickly drawn condemnation from Republican lawmakers and right-wing media.
Can you believe that?
Apparently only Republican lawmakers and right media object when the Department of Homeland Security, part of the U.S. security state, tries to install under Joe Biden a disinformation czar who's a caricature of Democratic Party partisan politics and American liberalism.
That's now just right-wing to object to that?
Republican lawmakers and right-wing media said CNN pointed to her past tweets and statements regarding Hunter Biden's laptop and Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called Steele dossier.
Yeah, the disinformation expert was one of the leaders of claiming the 100-byte laptop as Russian disinformation itself a total lie, and she also promoted the Steele dossier, complete hoax and fraud.
Quote, I had hoped we would be more transparent about how the board was going to operate and what it was going to do, she said, acknowledging that the new initiative should have been rolled out differently, as if that was the only problem, that it was just kind of a PR problem in how it was described.
And then here was the New York Times in April last year when she formed her new group.
Quote, new group joins the political fight over disinformation online.
Quote, the group intends to fight with its leader, Nina Yankovic, and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and their allies to undermine researchers who study disinformation.
Quote, she has joined the American Sunlight Project with two veteran political strategists.
Mr. Alvarez Aranas, formerly a communication strategist for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that seeks to counter domestic authoritarian threats.
And Eddie Vale, formerly of American Bridge, a liberal group devoted to gathering opposition research into Republicans.
The organization's advisory board includes Kate Harbath, a former Facebook executive who was previously a top Senate digital strategist for Senate Republicans, and Nik Mushevich, a founder of the Movement Advance Project.
I think that tracks threats to democracy and gay, lesbian, and transgender issues.
And Benjamin Wittes, a national security legal expert at the Brookings Institute and editor-in-chief of Lawfare.
It's been established as a non-profit, etc., etc.
So, these are the kind of people who have been grotesquely empowered, who Mark Zuckerberg not only contempt today, but also threaten their funding, and they are...
Incredibly upset about it, as you might imagine.
There has been some backlash even before this.
There was this academic who was named to lead the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was a focus of Matt Taibbi's reporting and others with the Twitter files about how much of a critical role they play in shaping what is called disinformation to get the government to censor.
And here from the Washington Post in June of last year, Stanford's top disinformation research group collapses under pressure.
The Stanford Internet Observatory provided real-time analysis on viral election falsehoods, but has struggled amid attacks from conservative politicians and activists.
Harvard, too, got rid of the very well-funded part of their university that was supposedly about combating disinformation, so there has been a growing recognition.
That this whole thing is a hoax based on a completely fabricated credential that has a very malignant goal of censoring the Internet.
Now, one of the most significant ways in which Facebook has imposed political censorship, and this is actually the very first time I ever wrote about or reported on political censorship online, is through Facebook's collaboration with the Israeli government.
Here from September of 2016. More than eight years ago, I read an article in the Intercept headline, Facebook is collaborating with the Israeli government to determine what should be censored.
And part of that reporting was that 95% or more of Israel's demands to Facebook to censor pro-Palestinian accounts was being honored.
Facebook was censoring in almost every instance where Israel demanded it.
That was the start of my...
Reporting on and concerned about big tech censorship on the internet.
And since then there has been so many stories, including that the new global affairs chief who replaced Nick Clegg himself was Facebook's primary liaison to the Israeli government.
Just yesterday, or today rather, last night I think it was, Grayzone's Max Blumenthal obtained emails between one of the most toxic This was the organization that had leaks from it showing that they were determined to destroy, quote, Elon Musk's Twitter.
And Elon Musk sued them.
Matt Taibbi has reported on them, along with Paul Thacker, showing all their efforts to politically censor the Internet.
but Max Wollmuthal got emails between that anti-disinformation group working in "collaborative efforts" with the Israeli government to censor the internet.
So a lot of this censorship has not been directed at conservative speech.
A lot of it has been.
But a lot of it has been directed to pro-Palestinian speech.
We've covered this endlessly.
That has been one of the major causes of political censorship before.
And I have serious doubts about whether Mark Zuckerberg intends to end that, in large part because...
He's never exhibited any interest in ending that kind of censorship before, in large part because if this is about appeasing the Trump administration, which at least in part it is, there's obviously no pressure emanating from Trump world to end censorship efforts that are designed to shield the Israeli government from criticism.
If anything, there will be increased pressures to censor pro-Palestinian speech.
And you may have noticed that in Mark Zuckerberg's announcement, he kind of, in a very cursory way, flew past the idea that They were still going to censor to combat things like drugs or terrorism.
And it's very easy to just characterize speech you want to censor, especially if it's criticism of Israel as being promotion of terrorism.
That's what Facebook did going all the way back to 2016 to justify censorship of pro-Palestinian speech.
So there's a lot to be skeptical of.
There's a lot to watch out for.
There's a lot of reason to doubt that this is going to be some permanent, principled blow in favor of free speech.
But I'd say the same thing about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.
He made a lot of lofty claims about what he intended to do.
He didn't follow through on all of them.
Over the past couple months, he's gotten even more extreme about censoring what appears to be dissent that he wants to suppress.
But overall, the fact that Elon Musk has struck so many blows for a free internet...
Gone to war with so many different power centers has advanced the cause in a meaningful way.
Rumble has even more so, in a more principled way, in a more absolute way.
And so whatever exceptions there end up being, however politicized this ends up being, whatever insincere sentiments are driving this decision by Meta, the announcement itself, the policy, concrete policy steps they've already taken to cut off funding for and disassociate themselves.
From this rotted, fraudulent industry, definitely the worst and most severe blow to them since they emerged out of the sewer of censorship sentiments in the wake of Brexit and Trump's victory in 2016. These are all positive things.
I think even more so the reaction that you're now seeing.
I can't overstate here in Brazil how the government that has aggressively relied on political censorship.
is completely unhinged about this announcement, especially given that Zuckerberg clearly referenced in a very critical way, without naming Brazil, but saying it was in Latin America, that there are courts issuing secret censorship orders, which is exactly what's happening.
The EU has been determined to punish Axon, Twitter, and Elon Musk for not taking censorship orders.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has weighed in so heavily, On the side of that cause, it's going to make it much more difficult.
The fact that they're threatening to work directly with the Trump administration, obviously Elon Musk will do that.
Now Mark Zuckerberg is saying that he will.
All it would take would be a unified effort from social media outlets like Google, Meta, Axe, and a couple others, and then to say to the Brazilian government or to the British government or to the EU, no, we're not taking your censorship.
And we don't believe that you will ban us all from your country because imagine what your citizens are going to do and say and how they're going to react if they're suddenly without Instagram and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Google,
perhaps WhatsApp, basically just isolated digitally from the world, denied the right to use all of their favorite social media sites because their government has decided that it's so important that they be able to censor political content from those platforms.
We'll see whether or not that happens.
But at the very least, Zuckerberg's announcement is a positive development, even if it's cynical on his part.
I think it's gonna be highly consequential We're definitely going to report going forward on whether or not Facebook or Meta is fulfilling these promises.
But I think what is absolutely true is that it will undermine, I think in a permanent way, this Disinformation industry, this censorship industrial complex, and it will be the, if not the end, at least the beginning of their long overdue unraveling.
All right, so that concludes the show for this evening.
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