An indication of his version of reliability comes from the change of the fact-checkers to the community notes. It’s true that the fact-checking process wasn’t working well, in part because Zuckerberg didn’t defend the fact-checkers when malicious critics accused them of bias. It is also reasonable to expect that community notes are a useful signal that a post may be fallacious. But the power of refutation fails when participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved with convincing evidence. That’s a fundamental difference between the fact-checking that Zuckerberg got rid of, and the community notes he’s implementing. The world view of fact-checking It assumes that definitive facts, arrived at through research, talking to people, and sometimes even believing your own eyes, can be conclusive. The trick is to recognize authorities who have earned the public’s trust by pursuing the truth. Community Notes accept alternative opinions, but judging which ones are reliable is up to you. There is some truth to the saying that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but if verifiable facts cannot successfully refute the verbiage, we are trapped in a suicidal quicksand of babel.
Zuckerberg set out to be like Trump
The reporter of 60 Minutes Leslie Stahl once asked Trump why he insulted journalists who were just doing their jobs. “Do you know why I do it? I do it to discredit everyone so that no one believes them when they write negative things about me.” In 2021, Trump revealed another of his intentions: to benefit from an attack on the truth: “If you say it enough and you keep saying it, they will start to believe you,” he said during a rally. The consequence is that if social media repeats falsehoods enough, people will believe them too. Especially if previously recognized authorities are discredited and degraded.
That discredit is exactly what Zuckerberg and his host Joe Rogan did during a three-hour conversation in the studio of the podcast from Rogan in Austin, Texas. This has been Zuckerberg’s only appearance to explain his actions, another sign that he does not bow down to a media that no longer seems “trustworthy” or worth paying attention to. Zuckerberg and Rogan spoke at length about how the podcasters and the influencers They were more popular than conventional journalists, because no one trusts those institutions anymoreand celebrated statistics that many people get their news from social media these days. Although it is still far from being the dominant source.
I am a fan of podcastsespecially epic multi-hour interviews like Rogan’s. But as a substitute for the news it is a disaster. Reporters make countless phone calls, dig through mountains of documents, and travel around the planet trying to make sense of the world. The podcasters They get their knowledge from those reports, and perhaps also from biased scammers, random anecdotes, and paranoid visions. Additionally, as interviewers, some creators are entertaining but lax when it comes to asking difficult questions. It’s no surprise that Zuckerberg chose Rogan as the only place to defend his decisions. Rogan did not question whether his decisions were a concession to the incoming president, he only congratulated him.
Pinterest and Threads seem convinced that I’m sixty or in menopause. If you spend enough time in the feeds In these bizarre worlds, you can believe anything.
“The media is a prison for the truth”
The same week that the podcast of Rogan, Peter Thiel, the billionaire capitalist who led Facebook’s initial financing, published an article in the Financial Times which coincided with Zuckerberg and Rogan’s theory that the media shrouds things in darkness instead of illuminating them with sunlight. Thiel adopted similar terminology to include the media in a broad conspiracy called the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex” (DISC), which limits public debate. He joked that the internet, presumably under Trump’s influence, is helping “our release from DISC prison.” Somehow, the Financial Timeswhich is as inherited as the media, escaped from “this prison” to publish Thiel’s article.
Thiel’s examples of media suppression were some cases where the mainstream media exercised too much caution, such as the JFK assassination or Covid. But every day, the thousands of journalists who still have jobs seek the truth by gathering facts, whether to track down a mayor’s nighttime wanderings or to show how the FBI could have acted faster to stop a fake school attack. . Without facts, we cannot determine whether a Cabinet candidate is worthy of office, whether it is appropriate to help an ally, or why it is so difficult to fight fires in Southern California. Of course I’m biased, but this seems pretty obvious. The practice of journalism is already threatened by a post-internet failure of its traditional business models. What they did not see coming was a terribly effective political attack against their own foundations.
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