Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a five-minute speech early in the new year, announcing that Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would no longer conduct fact-checks on posted material.

It was an extraordinary about face.

In the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Meta built systems and employed professional fact-checkers to filter and reduce the reach of fake news on its sites, which had been found at least partly responsible for the wildfire-like spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and whatever that was about Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

On the day of the announcement, January 7, Meta also replaced its Hate Speech guidelines with weaker ones about “Hateful Conduct,” a move designed to make any scrutiny or oversight of speech — the primary means of interacting online — more difficult. 

Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk, and now Mr. Zuckerberg — all owners of social media platforms, Mr. Trump’s aptly named “Truth Social” — are not the first would-be dictators to discover the importance of re-defining key terms. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, about the inner workings of a totalitarian state, George Orwell explored the revision of history. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Orwell’s hero, Party member Winston Smith, is employed at the Ministry of Truth, altering newspaper reports. 

Alter the public record, change the event. 

The New York Times reported earlier this month that applicants for office in the new administration were asked if Joe Biden won the election in 2020, and whether the attempt to overthrow the State Capitol on January 6, 2021 was wrong. 

The right answers, the applicants said, were clear, and they had nothing to do with the established facts, or the public, historical, and legal record. 

Extremist ideologues are taking over the U.S. government. History is going to be rewritten. It’s happening right in front of our eyes, on social media platforms, and in the ways that key words and concepts, such as “censorship” and “free speech,” are being redefined. 

I offer here a guide to the re-definition of the truth offered in Mr. Zuckerberg’s assertion that Meta would no longer bother checking the facts, because fact-checking is a politically motivated act. It’s not in alphabetical order, because that doesn’t matter anymore either.

Ethical Standards: Old school or “legacy” words, like principles, standards, and ethics, were not mentioned in Zuckerberg’s remarks. Instead, “mistakes in the algorithm” create “censorship.” Ethical Standards are now called Regulations. As in “dialing back Regulations will reduce Censorship.” “We will catch less bad stuff,” as he says, but the higher purpose will be served. Free speech. Or “more speech.” Or something.

Free Speech: Say anything you want, except that one should not be able to say anything one wants, and stop going on about facts, truth, or decency. That’s evidence of bias.

Truth: This is a matter for “community notes.” The truth will now be crowd sourced. Soon it will cease to exist. As Zuckerberg put it, “after Trump was elected in 2016, the Legacy Media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried to be arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers were too politically biased.” 

Fact Checking: Repeat after me: Fact Checking Is Bad. There are no facts, only opinions, and if you believe in facts, you have the wrong ones. 

Censorship: See Fact Checking.

Mainstream Discourse: this is the opposite of efforts to create diversity, equity and inclusion. Especially when it comes to immigrants, women, or anyone who is not a straight, white male: efforts at fairness, such as DEI, have “gone too far.” See Hate Speech. 

Hate Speech: a relative concept. It can be either High Severity or Low Severity. The term High Severity is reserved for things that are illegal: Selling Drugs, Terrorism, and Child Exploitation. Everything else is Low Severity Hate Speech (or conduct), also known as Mainstream Discourse, and should be encouraged. 

Restore Free Expression: MAGA slogan. Means Allow Dehumanizing Hate Speech. See Free Speech and Hate Speech.

Online Harms Act: This does online platforms harm. 

Legacy Media: This is a new term for the traditional media, the kind that employs human beings trained as journalists, and which fact-checks as a matter of routine. It also means “thing of the past.” Newspapers of repute verify the reports and claims they put into the public domain. That’s just dumb. Zuckerberg lumps Legacy Media in with Government, as in, “Legacy Media and Government.” Democracy, government, facts, and the legacy media are all things of the past. See Ethical Standards.

Political Content: Also called Civic Content. What is traditionally called news and politics. Meta / Facebook / Instagram did not like Political Content, and had reduced it to about 3% of its offerings by mid-2023 as a way of killing off the Legacy Media. But now it does like Political Content. As long as it is fact-free and full of what was formerly known as Hate Speech but is now called Mainstream Discourse. Then it really, really likes it. 

Bias: This one is hard to get away from. See above about how there are no facts, only opinions. Likewise, there’s good bias and bad bias. Which leads to statements like, “we are less concerned about the bias of our teams in Texas.”

Trust & Safety: The teams in Texas that believe facts are a matter of opinion and have the right kind of bias against women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community are in charge of Trust & Safety at Meta.

Content Moderation: Also known as Censorship. Unless an algorithm does it, then it’s fine.

What I notice when I write it all out like this is how circular  the definitions are. Mr. Zuckerberg claims he wants to move toward “more speech,” but when facts and clear standards go missing, everything collapses. Nothing makes a lot of sense anymore, which I think is the underlying aim. 

President Biden said a very sad goodbye last week. Or, I, at least, was very sad. He pointed to two things: a very few individuals now control these incredibly powerful global platforms. They are deliberately using them to spread hatred and misinformation. They have siphoned off and concentrated enormous wealth  — in part by trying to kill journalism and legitimate media sites — and they are now moving toward controlling not just the U.S., but countries all around the world. 

Things are about to get very scary. We need to be there for one another. That might start by getting off Meta’s platforms.