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For years now, social media has been a vital tool in the political information wars, as its weaponization has opened a stream of misinformation far more powerful than traditional media could ever hope to achieve. This reached flood levels with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic — with deadly results as MAGA waged war on scientific fact.

Twitter/X owner Elon Musk has made no secret of his active involvement in Team Trump’s war on reality and its gaslighting about recent history for political gain. Following threats from Donald Trump, fellow billionaire social media platform owner Mark Zuckerberg has revealed himself to be a willing accomplice.

Meta’s Mea Culpa

Last month, the founder and CEO of Meta (the parent company of Facebook) sent an apologetic letter to the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), accusing the Biden administration of pressuring Facebook to “censor certain COVID-19 content.” Zuckerberg’s position is supplying oxygen to the MAGA narrative that there is a concerted, partisan effort to silence right-wing speech.

Despite their best efforts, including the political targeting of disinformation research, Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government failed to find the smoking gun to uphold the GOP’s “censorship” allegations. Which is why Zuckerberg’s apology for some of Facebook’s previous content moderation policies — and particularly his use of the word “censor” — is so striking. 

Posting the letter to Twitter/X, the House Judiciary Committee hailed it a “big win for free speech.” Self-proclaimed free speech champion Musk got in on the chatter, claiming the Biden administration’s requests for content moderation sounded “like a First Amendment violation” — though Zuckerberg acknowledged in the letter that his company was not forced to act on any of the “pressure” from the Biden administration to remove COVID-19 misinformation. 

When Facebook Fought the Good Fight

The letter from Zuckerberg came on the heels of the Supreme Court swatting down a related “censorship” lawsuit. Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) was an attempt to stop the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms, focusing on misinformation regarding the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. In a 6-3 decision in late June, the court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing, having failed to prove the harm they alleged.

In July 2021, President Joe Biden publicly accused social media companies like Facebook of “killing people” with the uncontrolled anti-vaccine misinformation proliferating on their platforms. The same month, Biden’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, called out social media companies for their COVID-19 misinformation issue and suggested changes be made to their algorithms. 

This immediately set off some Republican politicians, who claimed this was not an effort to protect the public’s health during a deadly global crisis, but rather an assault on the First Amendment by the federal government.

Publicly, Facebook rejected these accusations, with a spokesperson attempting to shift attention to their COVID-19 Information Center initiative:

We will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts. The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet. More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder tool to find out where and how to get a vaccine. The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives. Period.

Given that social media algorithms are geared toward click generation, provocative misinformation spreads much faster online than quality information. So, simply providing the latter is not sufficient to tackle the former. And, internally at the company, there was acknowledgement of the out-of-control COVID-19 misinformation problem. 

In October 2021, former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen testified to Congress about many known safety issues for users, including the mental health harm the platform causes children and its inability to tackle vaccine misinformation. She further claimed executives at the company misled investors on their handling of misinformation pertaining to COVID-19 and climate science. 

Back in December 2020, ahead of the initial COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Facebook announced it would remove anti-vaccine misinformation from its site as part of its “policy to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm.” 

That year, Zuckerberg was more than happy to take credit for praise the platform received for its content moderation strategy. 

Which makes his recent letter, casting blame elsewhere within his company for this same strategy and contradicting sentiments expressed by his own employees, all the more craven. 

The question naturally arises: With such strong winds at his back, what caused Zuckerberg to suddenly come about, reverse course, and hand his MAGA critics a big win in the run-in to the 2024 election?

Furthering the contradictions, Meta just last month beat a “censorship” lawsuit brought against them by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense. (The notorious anti-vaxxer has since suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump, who subsequently tapped Kennedy for his transition team.) The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did not find that the social media company collaborated with or was forced by the government to censor Children’s Health Defense’s questioning of the “government orthodoxy” on vaccines. Writing for the appeals court, a Trump-appointed circuit judge called Meta a “purely private” company and asserted it had a First Amendment right to moderate what was hosted on its platforms, upholding a 2021 decision from a lower court. 

Why the Cave? Why Now? What It Means

The question naturally arises: With such strong winds at his back, what caused Zuckerberg to suddenly come about, reverse course, and hand his MAGA critics a big win in the run-in to the 2024 election?

The celebratory right-wing response to Zuckerberg’s letter, and many mainstream media headlines about it, failed to address the damage wrought by online COVID-19 misinformation, particularly when it has come to the vaccines. 

During the Delta (2021) and initial Omicron (2021/2022) waves, there were an estimated 232,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US that could have been prevented with vaccination — and the proliferation of vaccine misinformation on right-wing and social media played a key role in this failure. 

Beyond the pandemic, the anti-vaccine movement has led to a decrease in routine childhood vaccination rates and to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable pediatric disease, such as measles. 

Furthermore, the issue of uncontrolled online vaccine misinformation is not limited to the US. In a recent podcast appearance with Health Policy Watch, pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez discussed how predominantly US-generated anti-vaccine misinformation is causing global harm: 

This US-style anti-vaccine rhetoric is popping into low- and middle-income countries as well. It’s not staying within US borders, so this is a full-on, negative global force that we’re going to have to find ways to manage.

With social media companies already falling well short in efforts to manage this problem, the further retreat manifest in Zuckerberg’s letter is particularly dangerous.

Unsurprisingly, experts who study online disinformation strongly rebuked Zuckerberg’s letter. Sander van der Linden, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge who studies misinformation and social influence, called Zuckerberg’s letter “absolutely ridiculous.” Having previously collaborated with Meta on initiatives to combat misinformation, van der Linden stated: “It is not unusual for other nations to collaborate with social media companies on harmful misinformation.” He added that Meta’s initial commitment to fighting misinformation was not something Zuckerberg should be apologizing for, calling the apology to Jordan “a political move” that “endangers good practice.” 

“I just hope Mark appreciates the irony that by giving Jordan what he wants, he himself is giving in to government pressure.” — Nina Jankowicz, American Sunlight Project

Nina Jankowicz, disinformation researcher and co-founder of American Sunlight Project, echoed these sentiments in her posts on Twitter/X and Meta’s Threads. She referred to Zuckerberg’s letter as “nothing more than a cynical ploy at self-preservation” and questioned its timing just months before this year’s presidential election. She called on Jordan to release transcripts of the “dozens of interviews and depositions with tech workers, including Facebook employees, who say they did not feel coerced by the White House.” 

“I just hope Mark appreciates the irony that by giving Jordan what he wants, he himself is giving in to government pressure,” Jankowicz said. 

Meta entered the pandemic with a preexisting political misinformation problem, as prominently displayed in the 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica scandal that helped propel Trump to the White House. And there is a disturbing COVID-19 tie to that scandal worth addressing by social media companies. 

In 2021, the benignly-named, UK-based anti-lockdown, anti-vax group Health Advisory & Recovery Team (HART) suffered a leak of their internal chat log, which revealed their use of media pressure campaigns on government as well as coordination of social media disinformation campaigns. The messages of Patrick Fagan, the former lead psychologist at Cambridge Analytica, stand out among the worst. 

At one point, Fagan acknowledges that a proposed social media campaign against pediatric COVID-19 vaccines would make them “in the eyes of the sleeping public … be seen as child murderers,” but, horrifyingly, claims he’s “up for it.” 

MAGA mastermind Steve Bannon was involved with Cambridge Analytica in 2016 and has been a major source of pandemic-related disinformation. His work with members of the HART group is discussed in the leaked message log. The man who infamously vowed to “flood the zone with shit” helped the far-Right use the COVID-19 crisis to sow political chaos, human toll be damned. 

Control over the flow of information and misinformation is clearly a challenging balance to maintain, but the determination of bad actors like Bannon to use mis- and disinformation to destroy society necessitates a corresponding determination to uphold basic standards for responsible communication. It is a difficult role and easy enough to abandon, especially when intense political pressure is brought to bear. The consequences of such abdication, however, are grave.

The Zuckerberg empire has a pattern of failing to rise to the occasion when it comes to content moderation, and part of this seems to stem from their leader’s resistance to admitting there is a problem. His unwillingness to take accountability continues to put the users of his platforms — and, given the ubiquity of said platforms, society in general — in danger. 

Meta’s swing from an apparent commitment to content safety to recently cutting a disinformation-fighting program, while their owner falls in line with MAGA with this letter, is deeply concerning. In capitulating to far-right politics, Zuckerberg encourages bad actors to continue to use his platforms, and him, to further their agendas. 

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