Brian Stelter, CNN's Chief Deplatforming Officer, who for years and years has made "combating misinformation" his main mission, calling up social media monopolies every time Media Matters ran a hit on a right-leaning speaker and demanding why are you allowing this Russian Disinformation on your platform!?!, is now shrieking that his censorious grift has taken a big hit.

Mark Zuckerberg's MAGA makeover will reshape the entire internet

Analysis by Brian Stelter, CNN

New York (CNN) -- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters.

Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting conservative opinions.

The recent elections "feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech," Zuckerberg said in his announcement, justifying relaxed new content moderation rules on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

"Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more," Zuckerberg said, repeating a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact checking.

"Right-wing talking point" = established and undeniable fact.

Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, with billions of users on its platforms worldwide, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways.

Tuesday morning's announcements seemed like they were addressed directly to Trump, especially since Meta first gave the news exclusively to "Fox & Friends," one of the president-elect's favorite TV shows.

The company's newly promoted policy chief Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sat with the Fox co-hosts and fully agreed with the show's "censorship" versus "freedom" framing.

...

Meta also has lots of business before the US government. The Federal Trade Commission has an antitrust case against the company that is supposed to go to trial in April.
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Meta is clearly trying to appeal to the incoming administration.

You mean that the government has a great deal of power over FaceBook, and that a president may use that power to bully FaceBook into doing the current government's bidding?

Weird, you claimed that nothing like this was possible over the past five years!

Zuckerberg, touching on two popular right-wing themes, said the company will "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse."

...

Conservatives immediately cheered Meta's changes while others, including misinformation experts, warned Meta's platforms would become even more of a cesspool. False and hateful content will likely become even more commonplace on the social networks.

The changes will also likely lead to layoffs at some news outlets. As journalist Jane Lytvynenko noted on Bluesky, Facebook and Google are "chief funders of fact-checking outlets" around the world, and "there are newsrooms around the world for whom that funding means survival."

"For those using the platforms, it means they are again on their own to discern what's genuine information and what's not," Lytvynenko added.

Oh no. People will have to "discern for themselves" what is true or not without the censorship services provided by bottom-feeding 22-year-old Oberlin College graduates with no other job prospects?

Whatever shall we do?

And this means that these bottom-feeding no-account unemployables will suddenly be unemployed? Anything but that!

Patrick Webb
@RealPatrickWebb

BREAKING: Fact-checkers claim they were blindsided by Meta's decision to end their partnerships and reportedly fear they won't be able to secure new business to fill the void, potentially putting them at risk of going out of business, according to Wired.

Please not the "fact"-checkers! Please don't let them lose their funding!

Even though their entire racket was to create a pretext for social media monopolies to ban other people's speech, and to toxify the right so that no advertisers would do business with them!

But no, not the "fact"-checkers!

FaceBook and Google definitely are paying most of the salaries of these censors. When the left and then the Obama and Biden Administrations demanded censorship, FaceBook and Google wanted to provide it for them. But they wanted to do so with plausible deniability.

So they began paying outlets to take on fact-checkers whose salaries were paid by FaceBook and Google (if my understanding of this is correct). In return, outlets who agreed to prop up the new censorship regime, like Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard, would gain favorable treatment from FaceBook's algorithm.

Then FaceBook and Google would take the "fact"-checks provided for by the "fact"-checkers whose salaries they were paying and use them as a basis to censor speech -- claiming that "third party independent fact-checkers" had ruled this speech as false or "hateful."

I'm sure they also paid millions and millions to Politi-"Fact" and other "fact" check organizations.

So yes, FaceBook deciding to pull the plug is a very real threat to these censors' ability to play censor. At least, more of them will have to go back to just demanding censorship freelance on Twitter.

Politi-"Fact" whines that it's not true they engaged in censorship -- all they did, after all, was provide extremely partisan fake fact checks labeling any speech they disagreed with "false" or "hateful" and then FaceBook would ban it.

We didn't ban anything, they cry! We only provided the "independent" pretext for censorship that all the left was demanding, and we continued labeling all conservative speech as "disinformation" and "hatespeech" once we saw all of this speech being censored!

This as led to the most astonishing NYT headline in years: "Fact"-checkers rule criticism against them for being "too partisan" to be false.

Mollie
@MZHemingway

A beyond parody headline from propaganda outlet New York Times

Kyle Mann of the Babylon Bee thinks the NYT might be horning in on his hustle.

Kyle Mann
@The_Kyle_Mann

I'd like to offer whoever wrote this headline at the New York Times a job at @TheBabylonBee

Axios throws scare quotes around "censorship." They want you to know they don't agree that censorship is censorship when leftwing censors do it.

Some help for the waves of coming laid-off "fact"-checkers: