Of Facebook and fascism

We welcomed 2025 with the hope that the new year would bring new beginnings. But the optimism did not age well as we were instead welcomed by companies who preemptively bent the knee to fascists. Though Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration is yet to occur at the time of writing this article, the desperate scramble of CEOs to appease fascism is more than enough to foreshadow the dark times ahead. Amongst the many big names who funded the rise of tech oligopoly in the United States such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and Jeffrey Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg probably stands out the most, primarily due to the widespread impact of his platform, which remains strong in many regions around the world, especially in Asia-Pacific. Countries like India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Pakistan lead in Facebook audience size as of April 2024.

Mark Zuckerberg decided to pull fact checking out of his platforms based on his claim that ‘the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created’. Now, Zuckerberg did not go into details on what he meant by ‘politically biased’, but given the current political climate, his words essentially function as a dog whistle to conservatives. He did not shy away from courting the political base of an authoritarian who spent his first term as the US President calling out social media platforms for ‘silencing conservative voices’, which as we know is just a euphemism for racist and sexist speech.

With Zuckerberg’s talking head, clad in his signature black shirt against a carefully curated wooden backdrop, telling us that we need ‘to get back to our roots around free expression’, we know for sure that Meta is selling a narrative of principle. He framed the abandonment of fact-checking as a step towards empowerment and neutrality. By this, Meta meant significantly altering its ‘Hateful Conduct’ policy particularly concerning discussions around immigration and gender. The BigTech company now openly allows calling trans people as mentally ill, as the updated policy states:

“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as "weird".” (emphasis added)

This policy shift does not, of course, extend to Alex Schultz, Meta's openly gay Chief Marketing Officer who, in an internal post, had the audacity to gaslight the entire LGBTQ community by suggesting that witnessing the abuse of queer friends and family members on Facebook and Instagram could paradoxically lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights. For Alex, the struggles of the queer community is just another resource that should be commodified and reduced to mere tools in Meta’s larger agenda. From here on forward, Facebook and Instagram will follow X’s approach to content moderation through ‘Community Notes’ that outsources responsibility to detect misinformation to its users. What it does basically is a Pontius Pilate approach that washes their hands of accountability while sidestepping Meta’s role as the very architect of a system which is so addicted to our data. Calling this a  win for freedom of expression is a delusion that only serves Meta’s neverending desire for profit.

Facebook, Meta’s leading platform, launched its ‘industry-leading fact-checking program’ in 2016 one month into the first Trump presidency and even banned Trump from the platform. Even back then, fact checkers that Facebook worked with were aware that their work was highly ineffective mainly due to the fact that the platform was not listening to them at all. If that even was not enough, Facebook was found to be promoting the same antisemitic misinformation that its fact checkers had originally identified when Facebook enlisted the PR firm Definers Public Affairs to investigate George Soros following his criticism of Facebook and Google as societal menaces at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Facebook has been using fact checkers as a PR stunt alongside with the publication of their self-congratulatory human rights reports that pat Mark Zuckerberg’s own back whilst whispering to his ears, ‘Hey Mark, you’re doing very well.’ Meta’s void promises of ‘giv[ing] people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’ are swimming in corporate jargons, with references to UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and GNI commitments merely empty salutations to tick compliance and deflect accountability. A prime example of which was when Meta flaunted its 2021 human rights report showcasing its third-party checking program in Myanmar. This is the absolute bare minimum the company could do after its complicity in the 2017 Rohingya genocide which pushed over a million Rohingya out of Rakhine. In 2022, Meta expanded its fact-checking program to Brazil, the Philippines, Kenya and India as part of ‘ensuring election integrity’.

Facebook's reliance on fact-checkers was destined to fail from the very beginning. It is like applying a band-aid onto a gaping wound and leaving it to sit there whilst blood continues to flow, akin to the rest of us drowning in an ocean of misinformation and propaganda. Fact checking is slow as opposed to disinformation, which spreads like wildfire across Facebook’s algorithm-driven echo chambers. It reaches millions before the truth can even start brushing its hair. Further, fact-checkers can only address a tiny fraction of misleading content. Researchers Pennycook and others (2020) found that by adding warning labels to some false news, fact-checking creates an ‘implied truth effect’ wherein people began trusting other, unlabeled stories more even if they were also false. Acting as both the arsonist and the firefighter, Meta offered us fact-checking as a quick fix to all the problems it has created. We accepted the illusion of action. We have convinced ourselves that at least it was doing something and probably even thought that Mark Zuckerberg was the lesser evil amongst all the tech bros, particularly after Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022. 

Believing that fact checking alone will solve the problem of misinformation is naive. The epidemic of misinformation cannot be solved by showing people the truth. There was no way fact checking would have ever worked, and Facebook knew that. It was used as a distraction to pacify critics and maintain public trust while continuing to operate business as usual. In mid 2024, Meta quietly removed CrowdTangle, the only tool that provided some level of transparency into how content spread and performed on its platforms.Its removal was a tell-tale sign that Meta is ready to usher in a new era of contempt for transparency. This is how Meta wants to ensure that people are less aware of how they are being manipulated and influenced. 

The less the public knows, the better…for Meta, not for democracy.

But misinformation was just the icing on the cake here. The real issue rots inside Meta’s business model that rewards the spread of misinformation, hate and outrage. Facebook has built an empire on algorithms that feeds on people’s fear while keeping us glued to our screens. And these tiny interactions we have on the platform are monetised through targeted advertising. We should have learned our lesson with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but instead, it seems that we have been inflicted by a collective unconsciousness in which we just all decided to forget and move on.

Whilst appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg's calls for ‘more masculine energy’. He went on and defended what he described as ‘really positive’ aspects of aggression, framing it as a somewhat undervalued resource in the society. In techbro lingo, this translates to embracing the relentless pursuit of profit at any cost. It represents a core capitalist ethos that valorises domination and competition as engines of economic success. His rhetoric, alongside the newly rebranded persona that ditched hoodies over gold chains and sweatshirts emblazoned with statements such as ‘Carthago delenda est’ (Carthage must be destroyed), markets an image that evokes the themes of dominance in the pursuit of power. His outspoken dismissal of apologies reveals his real self, the Mark Zuckerberg who unabashedly promotes a form of capitalism built on intense competition and supremacy.

But at least there’s a silver lining to this. The masks are finally slipping away. Now, we know exactly who the enemies of the working class are. And as they abandon hollow languages of diversity and inclusion that they adopted back when it was profitable, we now know that the allegiance was never with justice and equality, but with capital. BigTech has not betrayed anyone. This is the capital’s most naked form to protect wealth and power.

We chose to believe that Facebook, despite the troubling history of its founder, who began his journey by creating a website to rank women at Harvard University, could somehow evolve into a positive force. We held onto hope that Facebook would transform positively, even after Zuckerberg's actions in Kauai that positioned him as a symbol of neocolonialism. This ludicrous belief that companies will choose the common good over profit is what brought us to where we are today. Fascism is no longer knocking at our doorstep. It is inside our houses and through its collaboration with BigTech companies, it will take away what little remains of our freedom and soon our very capacity to dream of liberation.

The time for sitting at their tables is over. The time to dismantle their control has begun.