The Guardian's spot on reaction to the end of fact checking on Meta platforms

11/01/2025

How Mark Zuckerberg’s shift to the right could reshape the world

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief The Guardian

Donald Trump will be inaugurated in little more than a week – and the world is moving decisively towards him. The tech world that is, and it could have profound effects on all of us.

One of the clearest examples of this came with Tuesday’s stunning announcement from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg that his company is to get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told our tech reporters Dan Milmo and Robert Booth that the announcement meant Meta had clearly “heard the message from Trump”.

Meta’s platforms are used daily by about 3.3 billion people worldwide and, for many people, especially in the global south, Facebook is the internet. As tech writer Chris Stokel-Walker put it in a powerful opinion piece: “where Meta goes, the world – online and offline – follows. And Meta has just decided to take a drastic, dramatic handbrake turn to the right.” Nobel peace prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa said it would “allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform” and lead to a “world without facts”.

Even before Zuckerberg’s video, Blake Montgomery, in our TechScape newsletter, presciently considered the new political era at Meta after former Bush adviser Joel Kaplan replaced former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg as its head of policy. Then, after the announcement was made, Blake outlined Zuckerberg’s thinking, namely that he is simply following the prevailing political winds to curry favour with Trump.

In our opinion section, media professor Siva Vaidhyanathan wrote that Zuckerberg’s “move to Maga” came not through fear or reverence of Trump, but through “his longstanding and steadfast belief that his companies are the ‘solution, not the cause, of our global maladies’” while Arwa Mahdawi was blunt in her assessment: “We are very much living in an age of oligarchy.”