In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created" on both Instagram and Facebook, the
At this time, Meta’s Head of Public Policy was Joel Kaplan, a man whose previous work involved working as George W. Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, as well as handling public policy and affairs for Energy Future Holdings, which involved three private equity firms buying Texas power company TXU for $45 billion andimmediately steering it into bankruptcy due to the $38.7 billion in debt Energy Future Holdings was forced to take on as a means of acquiring TXU.
Jeff Horwitz reports in his book Broken Code that Kaplan personally intervened when Facebook’s health team attempted to remove COVID conspiracy movie Plandemic from its recommendation engine, and Facebook only did so once Roose reported that it was the most-engaged link in a 24 hour period.
Naturally, Meta’s choice wasn’t to “fix things” or “improve” or “take responsibility.” By the end of 2021, Meta had disbanded the team that ran CrowdTangle, and in early 2022, the company had stopped registering new users. In early 2024 — months before the 2024 elections —CrowdTangle was officially shut down, though Facebook Top 10 had stopped working in the middle of 2023.
Meta hasn’t “made a right-wing turn.” It’s been an active arm of the right wing media for nearly a decade
2·7 hours ago