Billionaires offer yet another warped inversion of reality feeding Trump's fascistic impulses

This week came the news from Mark Zuckerberg that META—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—will end its fact-checking program.

Yes, the fact-checking that Donald Trump and MAGA didn’t like over the past eight years, put in place beginning in 2016 after Russian interference in our election. The fact-checking that continued—flawed and weak as it was—over the following years to fight the kind of misinformation that fed conspiracies like the Big Lie that helped fuel the attack on the Capitol in 2020.

"Mr. Zuckerberg, “the New York Times reports, “noted that 'recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.'" The Times made clear that Zuckerberg’s moves—all his moves—are meant to placate Trump.

Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated [Joel] Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.

This claim about speech is an absolute travesty because promoting “free speech” is not the same as allowing unchecked misinformation. But also because Trump is not interested in free speech. He only wants his speech elevated while any negative news about him is squashed.

He’s suing the Des Moines Register over a poll he didn’t like.

He’s trying to prevent the federal government from releasing Jack Smith’s final report.

Donald Trump doesn’t like free speech and has sued publications, including the New York Times, unsuccessfully, so he could stop them from reporting the truth about him.

He’s said he wants to change libel laws in America to make them stronger, all so that he can stop publications from writing things about him that he does not like.

Now, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram will operate pretty much like X. There will be “community notes” but no actual moderation; the truth will only be relied on by other users who might be there to monitor—and fight with one another over—what the truth is.

And after several years in which META throttled any political news or posts from many users (a great many who were on the political left) on Threads and Facebook—claiming people were tired of it—they’ve decided the time has come stop doing so. It just so happened that they did that during a Democratic administration to many on the left, but now they’re fine with it under a Republican administration as MAGA is excited about politics.

“We're bringing back civic content,” Zuckerberg said. “For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we're in a new era now..."

And Facebook, Zuckerberg said in what seems like a declaration that he’s opening the floodgates on hate, will "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse."

Of course, at X, Trump has Elon Musk pumping out disinformation by the hour and suppressing any truths about Trump that he doesn’t like. And Musk, too, has infamously done this in the name of promoting free speech. These guys are shameless in promoting their speech while squelching other speech and calling it all free speech.

At the Washington Post, owner Jeff Bezos is facing more reporters and staff leaving—an award-winning cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, quit last week after her cartoon criticizing Bezos and other media executives was spiked. So much for free speech. At the Los Angeles Times, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, a scientist who previously criticized Trump and knows the dangers of people like RFK, has now praised Trump’s choices to lead scientific agencies, and it was reported that he recently told the editorial board to “take a break” from knocking Trump.

It used to be that Trump and MAGA relied solely on the Rupert Murdoch empire—Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page—to promote conspiracies and suppress truths. All this was under the guise of “free speech,” but of course it’s about suppressing the truth, which is anything but free speech. The power of Fox alone was something that’s been almost impossible to counter. But now think about it amplified with these other news and information outlets.

Even when ABC News caved, when it settled with Trump over the defamation suit, giving $15 million for his presidential library and museum, it was an act of promoting speech that is approved by Donald Trump—while squelching a story he disapproved of, that he was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, which the judge said was tantamount to rape if not technically under New York law. The money is slated to help fund an institution—a library and museum—that will be a propaganda arms building up lies about Trump and his legacy while hiding all of the criminal activity and ugly actions he took. That’s Trump’s version of free speech.

Yesterday we witnessed the certification of the election on January 6th. It was eerie for us all because it was as if the violence and desecration, the attempt to overturn the election four years ago, didn’t happen. This is what Trump is trying to do in erasing his past, still promoting the Big Lie, and shaping corporate media companies so that they will help him.

We have to be the ones who remind America of the truth, over and over again. It won’t be easy—nothing is about taking on this second Trump era—but that will mean continuing to build alternative sources while pressuring the corporate media as they try to curry favor and gain access.

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