The broligarchy's Faustian bargain — and ours

Are there still bluer skies online, or is it time to refocus on real life?

This week Meta capitulated.

The social media giant discontinued third-party fact-checking operations in the U.S. and brought MAGA-world figures like the UFC’s Dana White onto the company’s board of directors, all while opening up the company’s platforms to the sort of political posting it deprivileged during Trump’s first term. It certainly seems that the company has made a decision about its political future, one that falls in line with the position the other big social platforms are taking: rejecting any limits on “free speech” and handing over responsibility for policing content to users. And given the outsize role of social media in our lives, that’s a decision about our political futures.

How did we get here? And what, exactly, is social media’s role these days?

---

The Ink is brought to you by readers like you. Running a newsletter of quality is expensive. Support independent media today by becoming a paying subscriber.

---

The way Meta chief Marc Zuckerberg tells it, he’s simply returning power to the people, returning the company’s “roots around free expression” and pushing back against the Biden administration’s “censorship,” i.e., requests from agencies to police vaccine and other health mis- and disinformation. With that out of the way, as Zuckerberg tells it, the incoming Trump administration offers “the opportunity to restore free expression.” It’s a turnabout for a company that was at the center of the fake news firestorm that helped launch Trump to his first presidency in 2016 and subsequently committed very publicly to cleaning up its act.

But adjusting to the new political reality means firing the professional researchers, and recruiting their replacements in supposedly neutral places like Texas rather than “biased” locales like California. Mostly it means putting the readers to work on a “community notes” system inspired by the one Zuckerberg’s longtime rival Elon Musk has instituted at X. The system does not seem built to succeed.

What is it for, then? When it comes to Musk’s commitment to crowdsourcing factuality, keep in mind that following X’s turn to relying on community standards, Musk has renewed his attacks on Wikipedia (supposedly in the name of “balance”), which depends on community input but has over the years built a relatively robust system of institutional safeguards and redundancies around them.

Why are the platforms circling the wagons around a laissez-faire position on the truth? How did they go from a supposedly idealistic vision of building global community to obedience in advance, or fascist capitulation, or whatever this is? How did our tech bro would-be saviors — the defenders of the light of consciousness, even — become the new broligarchs? Did Musk and Zuckerberg redpill themselves as they dove into the MMA rabbit hole as they prepared for their never-to-be cage match?

What’s in it for the platforms? There’s an obvious answer here, and it’s got everything to do with the oligarchic, plutocratic rearrangement of American power: self-interest, magnified as we enter the Trump II era. As Taylor Lorenz writes over at User Mag:

Meta doesn't actually care about protecting free speech or free expression, they care about pandering to conservatives who might seek to regulate them.

Meta is facing an antitrust trial in April, and the company has lots of other business on the radar of the U.S. government. Trump has threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison for "the rest of his life,” and Brendan Carr, Trump’s new FCC chairman, aims to regulate tech companies like Meta by curbing Section 230 protections and increasing oversight

Judd Legum suggests at Popular Information that Facebook’s post-2016 changes were mostly focused on insulating its business operations from potentially inflammatory posts and managing PR, and the platform has never really committed to fact-checking in the first place:

Meta's fact-checking program was designed by the company, not journalists. It was intended to insulate the company from responsibility for misinformation that spread on the platform. As part of Meta's program, it partnered with and provided financial support to certain fact-checkers certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Meta chose when and how to use these fact checks across its platforms.

Over the years, Meta took a number of steps that made its fact-checking program ineffective. For example, it banned all fact-checks of politicians. And, as Popular Information reported, Meta pressured the IFCN to certify low-quality right-wing websites, including the Daily Caller, as fact-checkers. The Daily Caller then used its position to downrank factually accurate articles that cast Trump in a negative light. Meta also used fact-checks produced by journalists to "inform their automated systems, sometimes leading to erroneous application of labels that fact-checkers were unfairly blamed for."

So it might be most straightforward to read this latest shift in the same light. This is, first and foremost, a company responding to the shifting demands of stakeholders — in this case, one specific stakeholder, the one who matters most to corporate leaders in the coming America as they envision it: the incoming president. Underscoring that, the platform does seem to be willing to pull down damaging information in some cases that suit company purposes and are likely to please that stakeholder.

That is to say, Facebook has always been this way, evolving to find its audience as it shifted from offering hot-or-not ratings to “giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” A question for the broligarchs, of course, is what happens to them if (or when) it all goes south, and there’s plenty of speculation out there about that.

But what’s much more important is what happens — and what has already happened — to the rest of us, stuck in the world that the platforms have remade, dependent on these platforms for our social lives, our business lives, our very identities, and about to face the new regime they’ve enabled.

It’s long been an article of faith —at least among liberals — that, as the comedian Rob Corddry put it back in 2004, facts “have a well-known liberal bias.” So the big philosophical shift, in this Trumpian era, has been the rejection not just of that bias, but, with it, of the facts themselves.

Thus the rise of a world that’s post-truth, where facts no longer reign supreme. Long-simmering mistrust of institutions has boiled over and swept those institutions away, while the concept of neutrality has given way to a Fox-ified bad-faith notion of “fair and balanced” discourse. That’s the context in which “fact-checking” becomes “censorship.”

Unfortunately, this happens as the MAGA movement has successfully rewritten — or at least obscured — the historical record. The efforts may seem ridiculous to the factually aware, but there's a good argument to be made that Trump’s victory in November was predicated on rewriting the story of the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

And that brings us to an open question — or, rather, questions:

What does society still need from social media, and from digital platforms in general? Are they actually meant to take — are they even capable of taking — the place of the public square, functioning as a digital commons? Or can it just be a place to nerd out on niche interests and connect with friends? And can any of that coexist with the business interests that drive the platform owners? Does anyone really want an everything app that covers it all, from banking to gaming? Should any digital platform really try to be everything to everyone?

And why are they in the business of arbitrating the public trust anyway, even if that’s to establish the definition of what’s neutral? If, as polling suggests, we don’t trust institutions anymore — the media, government agencies, elected leaders, the courts — who do Americans trust? Who is the proper arbiter of the public trust?

Who owns free speech? And how much do we need to be online, exactly?

---

Your support makes The Ink possible, so if you haven’t joined already, we’d be honored if you’d become a paid subscriber. When you do, you’ll get access each week to our regular posts and our interviews with the most thoughtful people out there — and you’ll be able to join the conversation in our comments section.

---

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images