On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” host Chris Hayes reacted to Meta ending its fact-checking program and thus allowing more speech and giving the company’s leaders less influence over speech on the platform by stating that the move shows that CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees “an opportunity for cementing a kind of tech oligarchy where the leaders’ favorite billionaires run the country.” And “a country ruled by Donald Trump and like four or five billionaire tech dudes is a wildly dystopian vision that is fundamentally at odds with our commitment to self-governance and what most Americans would reject. These are the anti-democratic forces of concentrated power, and they are all aligning in the open, in front of our faces. They’re not pretending to do otherwise. It is chilling in its own way, but also very clarifying to have them all standing on the same side.”
Hayes said that Zuckerberg didn’t decide to institute the fact-checking policy on his own, they did so after reporting on how Facebook was used in the Myanmar genocide, and “Imagine having to tweak your product because you realized that the libelous violent incitement on your platform spurred on the mass slaughter of an ethnic minority. … Zuckerberg was raked across the coals by senators in open hearings on Capitol Hill. That was when the Facebook billionaire realized content moderation was good, or if not good, at least necessary. It was something he had to reiterate again after January 6…when it became obvious that Trump and his allies used Facebook to spread election lies and organize the rallies that would become a deadly Capitol insurrection. After that, Meta banned Trump from its platforms, a move Zuckerberg openly defended at the time, saying that Donald Trump had used their platforms to incite a violent insurrection, which is obviously not even a controversial claim, he had. Now, here we are, Zuckerberg’s just, I guess, memory-wiping all of that, rolling it back to placate the incoming president he once banned, the top vector of disinformation in America today, an incoming president, who, just months ago, wrote that Zuckerberg plotted against him in the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO would ‘spend the rest of his life in prison’ if he crossed Trump again. Do you think that perhaps swayed Zuckerberg? I don’t know. Donald Trump, though, has a theory.”
After playing video of Trump saying Zuckerberg likely did respond to threats, Hayes stated, “Now, there’s no question that Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook all want to avoid the ire of Donald Trump. But I really think that that’s only part of the story and we shouldn’t just view it through that lens. These are billionaires who have class interests. They have empires of their own to preserve and expand. They see an opportunity for cementing a kind of tech oligarchy where the leaders’ favorite billionaires run the country. This is a model that exists in other countries. They also look at their fellow billionaire bro, Elon Musk, it seems to be working for him. Why shouldn’t it work for them? Now, I think a country ruled by Donald Trump and like four or five billionaire tech dudes is a wildly dystopian vision that is fundamentally at odds with our commitment to self-governance and what most Americans would reject. These are the anti-democratic forces of concentrated power, and they are all aligning in the open, in front of our faces. They’re not pretending to do otherwise. It is chilling in its own way, but also very clarifying to have them all standing on the same side.”
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