Facts are never convenient. Just take a look around you, at your friends and family members, at the people you see, or just take a closer look at your thoughts, and you’ll realize that the facts are almost always inconvenient. Since facts are inconvenient, everyone tries to avoid them. Silicon Valley, full of vaunted and imaginary technology companies, has never cared much for facts. That is, until 2015-16 when this misinformation and indifference towards facts became such a big problem that it turned into multiple scams. The biggest of these was the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scam. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved to stem the damage around the same time Donald Trump entered the White House. He declared that facts are important because lies spread through Facebook may have helped some politicians. This was the beginning of institutional “fact-checking” on Facebook. On January 8, as Trump is on the verge of starting his second term as US President, Facebook is now officially ending its “fact-checking”.

What a change in just 8 short years! Mark Zuckerberg announced the change in a quick video. To make sure people got the message, Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan then went on Fox & Friends and reiterated everything Zuckerberg said.

Times are changing, Zuckerberg said, and he highlighted that facts are no longer as important as speech. “The recent elections once again feel like a cultural turn toward prioritizing speech,” he said. “So, we’re restoring free expression on our platforms (and) getting rid of fact-checkers.”

It is quite clear why Zuckerberg is doing this. There are two sides to this – both are quite clear.

The move to downgrade the facts comes just two weeks before Trump re-enters the White House. When Trump lost the election in 2020, the tech industry, which had spent the previous four years fighting him, breathed a sigh of relief and moved quickly to de-platform him. Both Twitter and Facebook banned Trump in the following months. Twitter aka X lifted the ban after Elon Musk bought it. Facebook reinstated his account in January 2023, but with additional monitoring. Then, in the middle of last year, when it became clear Trump could win, the account was fully restored.

Now, with Trump set to be sworn in as the next US president, big tech is trying to get back into his good books for a number of reasons. Everyone is sweating and working hard. Some tech CEOs have pledged to donate money to Trump’s inauguration. Some people are making exactly the “right” noise. Zuckerberg, by way of extending an olive branch, is simply getting rid of “fact checking” on his platform, the kind of fact checking that often targets outlandish claims made by Trump supporters.

“After Trump was first elected in 2016, legacy media consistently wrote about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said on January 8. -Checkers has been too politically biased and has destroyed more trust than it has built, especially in America.”

Read between the lines and you’ll realize that Zuckerberg, by getting rid of “fact checking,” is simply moving toward giving Trump supporters a blank check to share information or spread misinformation — just like on Facebook and the Meta platforms. Instagram. Well, Trump supporters as well as everyone else.

But it’s also self-serving in another way

However, getting into Trump’s good books is only half the story here. Mark Zuckerberg is a smart guy by any measure. If you look at what he has accomplished and accomplished, he is almost a genius. He is also very intelligent. Zuckerberg, like most other founders and CEOs in Silicon Valley, is not a fan of rules. Whether necessary or unnecessary, regulations have always troubled tech giants like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos. They want to create and do things with minimal restrictions and regulations. They believe that many regulations, or actions like fact-checking every information that comes to their platform, do nothing but slow them down.

Regulating something costs time, people, and money. Plus, people and money can be better used creating and building something, or so tech founders argue.

When Facebook started its own fact-checking program, and created the Facebook Content Oversight Board with people like Alan Rusbridger, Zuckerberg did so under enormous pressure. He was facing severe criticism from the media and regulators around the world in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fact-checking program was not actually meant to be “fact checking”, but rather an attempt to deal with difficult times.

That moment of difficulty has passed. Facts no longer matter and we are truly at, as Zuckerberg puts it, a “cultural tipping point.” In other words, this is a perfect opportunity for Zuckerberg to get out of doing something he was never comfortable with. By getting rid of the fact-checking program, and imposing this checking business back on users via community notes, as Elon Musk does on Twitter, Meta would not only save money but also the headache that comes from not taking responsibility for something. .

You see, facts are facts. The problem Zuckerberg cites – “Fact-checkers are too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they built” – can be solved differently. There is no need to get rid of facts or fact-checking units. Instead, the solution may be to double down on the facts and adequately strengthen teams and mechanisms to overcome the political biases of fact-checkers, whether that bias is left-leaning or right-wing.

But that’s not what Zuckerberg is deciding. He’s going back to the classic Silicon Valley adage that we are not the “arbiters of truth.” In 2020, while Facebook had an institutional fact-checking program, Zuckerberg was not in favor of it. In an interview with CNBC he said, “I don’t think Facebook or Internet platforms in general should be the arbiters of truth… Political speech is one of the most sensitive parts of democracy, and people being able to see it “What do the politicians say?”

Unfortunately for them and Facebook it has until now been almost impossible to get out of the fact-checking that the website was forced to do 8 years ago. Such a move would have angered government regulators and given the media an opportunity to go after Meta again. But now with Trump back in power there is an opportunity. Zuckerberg is happily seizing it.