Mark Zuckerberg and the quest for truth
No to censorship and yes to freedom and individual responsibility
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and the famous founder of Facebook, announced that the social media giant is phasing out third-party fact-checking in favor of crowdsourced fact-checking, which he presented as a return to Facebook’s roots in belief in free expression. The reason for ending the program, Zuckerberg said, was that the fact-checking system had generated “too much censorship.” He declared in a January 7 video on the ending of the fact-checking program that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” Not all monitoring of content will be eliminated, however, in that criminal activity, pornography, and hate speech will be detected and blocked; but there will no longer be an effort to prevent the dissemination of so-called disinformation. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
In “Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Evolution, From Apologies to No More Apologies,” published in The New York Times on January 7, Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac maintain that Zuckerberg was never comfortable with the involvement of fact-checkers in his social media companies. He founded Facebook in 2004 with the intention of providing a platform for fun and exchanging content among family and friends. But as the company grew, governments and civil society called upon him to make more efforts to moderate the content being disseminated on the platform. This pressure became especially strong following the elections of 2016. With encouragement of some of his associates at Facebook, Zuckerberg began to meet regularly with politicians and civic leaders, and he brought fact checkers on board. But despite such efforts, Zuckerberg continued to be blamed for misinformation being disseminated on Facebook and Instagram. In 2019, he began to push back, maintaining in an address at Georgetown University that Facebook had been founded to give people a voice on the basis of the principle of free expression. Since then, advisors who encouraged him to become engaged in discussion with political leaders have left the company. He now focuses on his own interests, such as extreme sports, rapping, and promoting the company’s AI initiatives. He declared recently in a podcast interview that he “should have rejected accusations that his company was responsible for societal ills.”
A commentary in The New York Times by Steven Lee Myers acknowledges that it is impossible for social media platforms to identify and remove errors or lies that people post. However, he laments that Meta will stop trying to do so. He described Zuckerberg’s announcement as indicating “an industrywide retreat in the fight against falsehoods that poison public discourse online.” The result will be a permanent corrosion of civic life, in which “truth, especially in politics, is simply a matter of toxic and inconclusive debate online.”
Republicans, Myers notes, have been opposed to social media policing of posts, viewing it as a form of government censorship, having observed that government officials have called upon social media platforms to remove posts with respect to such conservative causes as election fraud and Covid vaccines. The story of Hannah Byrne, a disillusioned former Meta fact-checker, reinforces the notion of implicit government censorship. Byrne maintains that the assumptions of Meta’s content moderation policy closely parallelled the shifts in U.S. foreign and domestic policies, as reported by Sam Biddle in “The Facebook Apostate” (The Intercept, December 4, 2024).
With Republicans now controlling the government, Myers anticipates less social media content policing, which will lead to the proliferation of tendentious content, without concern for strict adherence to truth, making it even more difficult to separate fact from fiction. In a similar vein, Natasha Lennard, writing on The Intercept, interprets the META announcement as an accommodation to a new political reality in Washington in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, and she notes that such accommodation is the current general tendency in Silicon Valley.
Focusing on the person to escape left-wing groupthink
Zuckerberg’s turn to attention to his personal interests is far from an ideal resolution of the question of truth. Given his high visibility, the turn will reinforce the common American tendencies toward excessive individualism and cultural ethnocentrism. But turning to personal interests is far better than trying to fact-check, when the fact-checking industry does not have the epistemological foundation for undertaking the task.
Sabrina Joy Stevens describes herself as a recovering ideologue and former leftist whose heart has been broken by the evolution of the movement for human and civil rights toward unwitting undermining of human rights and the destabilization of society. Her article, “The Disinformation Industry Promotes Left-wing Groupthink, Not Truth,” was disseminated on the Journal of Free Black Thought on December 17, 2024.
Stevens writes that funders began to give money to anyone who was willing to address the supposed role of disinformation in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which gave rise to what she describes as a “dishonest and partisan industry” that seeks to counter “disinformation.” She has given the name “Groupthink, Inc.” to this “counter-disinformation” field. She writes:
Groupthink, Inc. is the cumulative effect of the subset of academics, activists, political operatives, and media professionals devoted to the manufacture, marketing, and enforcement of a social and political consensus that flatters their self-perceptions, aligns with their ideological preferences, and exalts them into positions of undeserved power. These academics, activists, operatives, and media people, supported by funding from Big Philanthropy and the government, have pushed identity politics, luxury beliefs, and all manner of related nonsense on Western societies over the past few decades, particularly since the mid-2010s. Their efforts have created a manufactured consensus about race, gender, sexuality, class, and innumerable other topics.
Stevens confesses that she should have known when she entered the counter-information field in 2019 that the field could not attain its goals, inasmuch as it is not possible for people who adhere to the post-modernist belief that all truth is relative to be able to effectively oppose the rise of “alternative facts.” Those whose ideological framework is “grounded in an assumption that there is no such thing as objective truth have literally no basis to label anything as mis- or disinformation.”
Stevens explains that she was too caught up in a leftwing worldview to see this inherent contradiction, and in addition, she had assumed that the effort would be non-partisan, seeking to expose false claims made by all political actors, regardless of ideology. However, she found in her experiences in the industry that it is partisan and ideologically driven. She discovered that major media outlets, like The Washington Post, attach “terms like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ to anything that doesn’t fit their political prejudices.”
She discovered that people in the counter-disinformation field assume that “they know what kinds of people are or are not credible, rather than seeking and following actual evidence” (italics in original). Shielding themselves from alternative perspectives, they fail to see that a consensus formed through the exclusion of dissenting voices is different from truth. Therefore, using the leftist consensus as the standard for defining truth and misinformation, they focus on right-leaning targets, rather than looking for false information from every political perspective.
She found that the people in the field are unable to define exactly what counts as accurate information as against disinformation. For many people in the counter-disinformation field,
ideological conformity preempts the pursuit of evidence. They are so used to ideologically skewed campuses and professional organizations, and so accustomed to hearing certain perspectives and opinions echoed throughout the media and culture, that they reflexively treat ideas that conform to their political and ideological expectations as being synonymous with truth itself. And then they partner with other influential organizations, media outlets, public officials, and Big Tech to enforce that conformity, stifling the free flow of information we need to make important personal and collective decisions. Pressure from people in networks like these are why tech platforms sometimes hide, demonize, or just ban content and users that challenge deceptive activist dogma presented as expert consensus on issues like gender ideology or abortion. It’s why even accomplished experts with robust evidence-based findings have been stifled for challenging powerful people’s preferred narratives on things like pandemic response or environmental policy.
§
How do we discern the truth?
I personally became aware of the problem of the objectivity versus the relativity of knowledge in the early 1970s, when I was one of a few white students in a master’s degree program with an all-black faculty, which was formulating a colonial analysis of the modern world. I found their arguments persuasive, and I could not fail to appreciate that their description of the modern world was fundamentally different from what I had previously learned at the state university. At the same time, I did not doubt that my professors at the university were sincerely committed to the pursuit of truth, however ethnocentric their discourses now appeared.
There were some tendencies in social thought at that time which maintained that truth is inevitably relative to the social context of all persons who seek to understand, and that the resolution of differences in understanding actually occurs in the terrain of political and economic power. I believed strongly that this view was completely unacceptable in moral terms, because it would condemn us to a condition in which truth becomes what those in power say it is, negating the capacity of the people to discover the truth, using truth as the foundation of their struggle against the false claims of the powerful. I could not even imagine back then the situation we have today, which is worse than the eclipse of reason by the powerful that I had imagined. Today, political actors feel no obligation to adhere to standards of truth in their claims, because it is widely assumed that truth does not exist. It is now clearer to me than ever, if relativism is true, humanity is damned.
That young man that I was in the 1970s felt a moral obligation to rescue truth, that is, to find the means through which truth could be attained, delegitimating the claims of relativists, with their dangerous implications. This mission took me to a study of the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan, under the guidance of Fathers Joseph Fitzpatrick and Gerald McCool at Fordham University. Lonergan stipulated that, in the first place, one who seeks to understand must be committed to truth as the highest desire. I had no difficulty in embracing this proclamation of the need for personal authenticity. Certainly, one had to give the desire to understand the highest priority, above personal interests and above the interests of one’s nation, class, race, ethnic group, gender, or sexual orientation, even though such interests would always be felt.
In the second place, on the basis of his study of the various fields of human knowledge, Lonergan explained the process of human understanding. The quest for understanding invariably passes through different levels, he maintained, beginning with experiences in a particular social context. As the quest unfolds, persons seeking to understand move through different levels by addressing relevant questions, and most importantly, by bringing new relevant questions to consciousness through personal encounter with persons of different horizons, critically analyzing their claims, but also taking them seriously. This process involves the duty to personally encounter and take seriously persons of different scientific paradigms and ideological viewpoints as well as persons of different cultures and nations.
The precise direction of the quest for truth depends on what issues one is addressing. In my case, I was interested in the causes and solutions of global inequality, so my quest for truth took me to personal encounter with the social movements and political leaders of the Global South and East. This process deepened my understanding of the profoundly ethnocentric nature of public discourse in the United States, which today fails to appreciate that the struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism has emerged to become the central struggle of our times; and which fails to appreciate that the anti-imperialist governments, political parties, and social movements of the Global South and East repeatedly affirm the existence of objective knowledge in the realms of both fact and value, including, for example, such principles as the right of all nations to sovereignty, to control over their natural resources, and to non-interference in their internal affairs by powerful states. In addition, the nations of the Global South and East have called for a dialogue among civilizations, believing that this is the key to resolving differences in understanding and conflicts of interest among nations and regions.
It therefore is evident that the political culture of the United States is completely unprepared to undertake the task of identifying false claims. The incapacity of the nation to distinguish true from false claims is rooted in a decades-long inattention to epistemological issues, which has led the nation toward a certain degree of moral decadence, although, it should be noted, the possibility for renewal remains.
§
Where do we go from here?
I think that the decision of Zuckerberg against fact-checking and against policing of content is a good step, liberating social media from the censorship of leftist groupthink and well as the less arrogant politically motivated censorship from the Right. But there needs to be a persistent call for civility and for mutually respectful dialogue. And there needs to be a persistent call for personal authenticity, in which all who pursue understanding seek truth as the highest ideal, more important than particular interests, through listening to one another. There needs to be collective self-censorship on the internet, in which persons violating the norms of civility and authenticity are respectfully corrected in on-line exchanges.
Mark Zuckerberg says that he founded Facebook to give voice to the people. But the people can find that voice that expresses their collective interest only through respectful, civil, and authentic dialogue that seeks understanding for the common good. True leaders would repeatedly proclaim this necessity, in spite of ideological differences among them.
Freedom of expression combined with commitment to responsibility by the people is the way to use technological advances in communication, which are the result of human creative application of God-given talents.
A free subscription option is available, with capacity to read, send, and share all posts. A paid subscription ($5 per month or $40 per year) enables you to make comments and to support the costs of the column; paid subscribers also receive a free PDF copy of my book on Cuba and the world-system. Ten percent of income generated through subscriptions to the column is donated to the Cuban Society for Philosophical Investigations.