Zuckerberg's Rule Change Looks Like It Will 'Flood the Zone'
Meta is taking a page out of Russian propaganda and Steve Bannon
At first glance, it seems odd that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, is in his words, embracing its "roots around free expression," in what appears to be a bid to appeal to Donald Trump. The notion of Trump as a defender of free speech seems spurious: Trump himself has launched a flurry of defamation lawsuits against perceived critics, and some of these have been dismissed on First Amendment grounds.
Zuckerberg's loosening of Meta's fact-checking policies and restrictions around hate speech has little to do with constitutional questions: the First Amendment generally applies to government censorship and not private corporations. (If the First Amendment was relevant, Meta never would have instituted these restrictions in the first place.) However, Meta's policy change may, in former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's words, "flood the zone with shit," which he said is "the way" to deal with the "real opposition," which to Bannon is the media.
According to Meta training materials leaked to The Intercept, Meta will now allow calling minority groups "shit": phrases like “immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit" and “gays are freaks,” will now be free for users to post. These phrases are constitutionally protected from government censorship under the First Amendment, but as a private corporation, Meta had been free to disallow it.
Now, alongside hateful content, users will see unmoderated news, including potentially more disinformation. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 33 percent of Americans--the highest share of any platform--regularly get their news from Facebook, the social platform with 3 billion users worldwide owned by Meta. No longer will the news be fact-checked by Meta, but may contain crowdsourced community notes, which Elon Musk's X uses. (The fact-checking program was launched in the aftermath of the onslaught of Russian disinformation in 2016; much of the disinformation boosted Trump.)
It's possible that, like X, Facebook users will vote with their feet and move onto other platforms like Bluesky or even pay to subscribe to a news site with reporting and fact-based analysis. However, Facebook, unlike most news sites, is free. (Since it is free, the user is the product by granting the platform access to personal data for advertisers to pinpoint.) That makes it more likely that users will stay put amid a torrent of disinformation, which often validates the user's point of view, unlike news stories.
The result will be that more and more facts will be up for debate. Now, sometimes that's a good thing -- Facebook was too quick to moderate "lab leak" theories about the origins of the COVID pandemic, a decision which it later reversed. But a platform where people are arguing over the humanity of immigrants or LGBTQ people may normalize violence and leave users feeling exhausted.
For a preview of what unmoderated Facebook might look like, the Russian-funded English-language propaganda channel RT (formerly known as Russia Today) offers an example. RT caught attention for covering topics which the U.S. mainstream media minimized, such as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. But RT also fielded so many far-left and far-right guests that the viewer was left so exhausted and confused that only an authoritarian figure like Vladimir Putin seemed to be able to cut through the noise. This was similar to Bannon's "flooding the zone" strategy.
Trump may end up playing a similar role on Facebook with its recently loosened speech policy. If in their News Feed, users see vitriolic posts about racial minorities, religious groups, and transgender people, they may look to Trump as the figure who can "tell it like it is" amid all of the cacophony. Additionally, independent journalism, to the extent that the Facebook algorithm shows it, is almost never as attention-grabbing as any of this. Meta may be allowing more speech, but in this case, more is, for the most part, not better.