Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to dispense with fact-checking on Meta is a terrible idea. Here’s why

Yep OK, this is just a bloke I found on X this morning talking about Meta’s decision to bring in Community Notes. Perhaps it’s satire. Perhaps it’s a sly comment on how mad the world has become. But I don’t think so. And even if it is, it’s so close to what many people think as to be indistinguishable from an honestly held opinion. And that’s chilling.

Because that’s what the rebranding of X has seen. The old phrase about a lie being halfway round the world before the truth has got its pants on - attribute that to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain or just a proverb - has been accelerated now, but what can be added is that a lie will make a splash and the clarification or apology will barely cause a ripple. And definitely what is seen in addition is that the truth or otherwise of a statement matters less these days - what has (sadly) become more important is whether the person making the statement believes it. And if they do, they have a free pass.

We laughed at Donald Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway a few years ago, when she defended a falsehood about the number of people who had attended Trump’s inauguration by saying it was an “alternative fact”. We had previously laughed about Boris Johnson’s Brexit campaigning about £350m coming to the NHS every week, which wasn’t true then and isn’t true now. We perhaps should have been more angry: those, in retrospect, were some of the first steps into the abyss, and now society - particularly online discourse, aided and abetted by the tech bros, is running towards darkness.

X’s Community Notes in fairness can be quite funny. They can puncture pomposity, they can deflate some statements. But in no way are they as useful and as unbiased as fact-checkers. And crucially, many notes don’t challenge facts but are just an alternative opinion. It’s telling that the complaints this morning are about how fact-checkers have a “liberal bias” - exactly the same playbook that has been used by right-wingers to discredit journalism over the last decade. If someone says or prints something about you that you don’t like, don’t tackle the facts - just say it comes from a biased position. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to disapprove of the Daily Mail and the Sun’s more extreme political positions, but denigrating all of journalism as “biased MSM” is stupid and reductive.

It plays into the desires of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest to live in a society where they are free to do as they please and make as much money as they want. Musk may have spent far over the odds for Twitter but he realised he could use it to court influence - he has performed a 180 on his previous opinion of Trump and will now be enmeshed in US government. And not only has this unelected man got the ear of the president, he also feels emboldened to attack our Prime Minister, our government ministers and our judicial system, while calling for an imprisoned far-right thug to rule the UK. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t tragic.

Zuckerberg has seen the way the wind is blowing, at the dawn of the anything-goes second Trump presidency. The decision to end fact checking is a lickspittle manouevre, it’s to curry favour. It’s not just Community Notes that have turned X into a sewer - the For You feed now suggests unpleasantness and Elon Musk at every juncture - but they are an example of a man getting exhilarated by the crowd chanting his name - and pandering to it as best he can.

We’ve seen that happen before in Europe, and it didn’t end well. Postwar democracy has been founded on checks and balances, compromise and partnership. Elon Musk’s new wave of populism would get rid of our system of government, journalism, Nato, the EU, and indeed most of our checks, balances and safeguards if it could. Mark Zuckerberg should think carefully whether he wants to steer his wagon into that convoy. Sadly, it’s clear that we’ve already seen the early answer.

By getting rid of fact-checking, Zuckerberg has signalled that he’s happy for irresponsibility, and feels no need to take an interest in what is published on his network. His move means that the so-called MSM have a big role than ever in standing up for people against the tech bros.