Hello, and welcome back to TechScape. Last Tuesday, I predicted Meta would enter a new political era after the departure of Nick Clegg. Two hours after I published last week’s newsletter, Mark Zuckerberg declared that the new conservative phase would begin. It was sooner and more brazen than I had expected – and faster-paced. Zuckerberg announced he would disband Meta’s US fact-checking operation because he believes his fact-checkers have been too politically biased. He feels the truth is better served by the mob; notes by Facebook users themselves in the style of Twitter/X will replace professional fact-checkers. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta would move its content moderation teams, which are separate from its third-party fact-checking operations, from California to Texas in a move, he said, will “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”.
The laundry list of what Zuckerberg has done to win Donald Trump’s approval is long, but today I’m going to focus on these two items in particular, as they are indicative of how the rich and powerful are bending the concept of the truth to their own ends.
The plan to dox Wikipedia editors and Meta’s moves are attempts to politicize the truth by controlling its custodians.
In news that is ominously and thematically related to Meta’s announcement, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which published the influential Project 2025 roadmap for the president-elect, has laid out plans to go after Wikipedia’s volunteer editors both online and off, possibly with facial recognition. Once doxxed, Wikipedia editors can be persuaded to stop “abusing their positions” and inserting what Heritage believes to be antisemitic entries. Heritage’s plan was first reported by Forward, in a great scoop.
It’s not clear what type of antisemitism the Heritage Foundation seeks to address, but prominent Jewish groups have complained in recent months about changes made to sensitive Wikipedia entries related to the war in Gaza and its consequences, per Forward. The implication of this assault is that the organization believes facts make Israel look bad. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has barred journalists from entering Gaza for similar reasons.
Last week was a banner one for the use of The Truth™ as a political cudgel. The plan to dox Wikipedia editors and Meta’s moves are attempts to politicize the truth by controlling its custodians. Facts online can be whatever you want them to be, rather than a shared set of incontrovertible, observable things that are the case, so long as you can manipulate their arbiters.
One surprising convergence of these pieces of news is that Wikipedia’s system of volunteer editors works. Through a thousand corrections and minuscule debates, we emerge with an agreed-upon version of the truth. Perhaps Zuckerberg imagines Facebook’s new system of community notes will work the same way. The differences between Facebook, Instagram and Wikipedia are as vast as the Gulf of America, though: the goal of Wikipedia is to compile and spread accurate information. That is not the aim of Facebook, Instagram, or any other social network, and has never been one of its strong points.
Meta ending fact-checking in favor of community notes: observable, verifiable truth is not as important online as agreed-upon truth. We can read between the lines of Zuckerberg’s loud proclamation that moderators will move from a liberal state to a conservative one: agreed-upon truth has moved to the political right – to Texas, specifically.
The laws and politics of the state that houses the moderators will in part determine the acceptable range of discussion on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook and Instagram are so large that their terms of service in effect set the Overton window for online conversation across the world. California allows people obtaining driver’s licenses to choose a non-binary option for their gender, X. Texas, by contrast, bans gender-affirming care for transgender minors. California’s governor has vowed to defend healthcare providers performing out-of-state abortions. Texas instituted a six-week abortion ban in 2021 – before Roe v Wade was overturned.
If one state is biased, so is its replacement. Meta’s moderators were already in Texas before the announcement, as my colleague Dara Kerr reports. The relocation proclamation is an obvious play for the approval of Trump and Musk, who are both furiously tweeting about how much of an idiot the governor of California is as I write this. They are wielding the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles against Gavin Newsom as a bludgeon. The fires did not incite them to action; they have hated Newsom for a long time. The wildfires merely present an expedient means to criticize him, whatever the reality of the blazes might be. As Trump and Musk blame diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for the fact that LA’s firefighters have not been able to surmount the blazes, Meta said on Friday it would terminate those programs.
The name of Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social, fits into this line of thinking. On X, he communicated to the public via tweets. That was his first administration. He has presided over this near-decade of the erosion of factual reality in US politics. He is an expert at working the referees of a discussion. It was in response to his election that Meta introduced its dead fact-checking program. Now, in his second term, he speaks to us in posts called Truths. He owns the political concept of The Truth™. Zuckerberg certainly thinks he does, at least. Joe Biden recognized the threat. He called Zuckerberg’s choice “really shameful”.
Users react to TikTok’s likely ban in the US
TikTok made its case before the US supreme court on Friday – unsuccessfully, early indicators suggest. Justices spent nearly twice the time questioning TikTok’s lawyer as they did the solicitor general who spoke on behalf of the US. They appear to have far more problems with TikTok’s argument that a ban violates the free speech rights of Americans than the government’s argument that TikTok presents an enormous, if theoretical, threat to US national security.
The ban is scheduled to go into effect on Sunday, 19 January, at which point TikTok will disappear from the app store but will remain available on your phone if you have already downloaded it. Parent company ByteDance can sell the app, but it has repeatedly proclaimed that it will not do so; TikTok has said divestment is impossible.
In response to the impending blackout, TikTokers are making videos bidding farewell to their “personal Chinese spy”. In their videos, they thank the spies in clunky, Google-translated Mandarin for five good years – TikTok debuted in the US in 2019 – of memes, dances, viral trends, and the collection of sensitive user data by a foreign adversary. Within the meme, people are expressing genuine sadness over the departure of an app that has brought joy into their lives as well as tangible financial benefits. What happens to the cottage industry of TikTok influencers now is anybody’s guess.
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In one emblematic thank you, Lisandra Vazquez, who had 128,000 followers, tells the camera: “To my Chinese spy, thank you for your service. If we don’t get to hang out anymore, I just want to thank you for the good times we’ve had. I just know it was you looking out for me and sending me those tarot readers telling me he was no good for me ‘cause there’s no other reason they would show up. You put ‘Sprinkle Sprinkle Lady’ in my life, and you’re still doing your big one with all the Bad Bunny content.
“You’ve connected me to a lot of people that I would have never met otherwise. You allowed me a place to have my voice be heard authentically, and you allowed me to leave a job that I hated so I could find a place here and make a job for myself on this platform.
“You know me better than I know myself. I trust you with all my data. Xie xie, you beautiful bitch. I love you. Thank you for everything,” she says.
The sentiment is genuine even as the form it takes is one of a joke. Another video, made by a TikToker with about 800,000 followers, shows her walking with a suitcase into the sunset. The caption: “Me because I’d rather move to China than Instagram Reels”. She’s right: Meta stands to benefit most from the demise of its most successful competitor.
“Personal spy” is a riff on the “my FBI agent meme”, making light of surveillance of US citizens by domestic tech companies and the federal government. Both the US and China are spying on their own citizens and foreign ones. Both Meta and Google collect sensitive data about their users like TikTok. The solicitor general said in Friday’s supreme court hearing that TikTok could operate exactly the way it does today if it had an owner in the US. Surveillance is fine, the government attorney seemed to say, so long we’re the ones doing it. The argument has carried water in court. The appeals court that denied TikTok an injunction against the ban in December sided with the government’s claim that the threat of covert manipulation by an adversary – no public evidence it has occurred yet – is reason enough for Congress to forbid foreign ownership of a popular communications platform. It is a compelling national security interest to prevent enemy spying while enabling your own.
Among the online hoi polloi, though, the obvious hypocrisy of “rules for me, not for thee” doesn’t play so well.
Read the full story on Friday’s hearing.
