The inauguration of President Donald Trump was unusual in many ways, but what stood out most was the presence of the leaders of the world’s largest and wealthiest social media platforms.
It wasn’t just X owner Elon Musk, who had been involved in the campaign along with many other tech companies, but also the CEOs of Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple. These figures, often described as the “new oligarchs” of the global arena, signaled their intention to align with the policies of the returning president – one who challenges the authority of the media, legal, and political establishment, and perhaps even the very concept of facts or truth itself.
While many Americans were concerned on inauguration day about Trump’s positions on issues such as immigration, climate change, and gender, the presence of these powerful digital platform owners should raise concerns far beyond US borders, affecting citizens around the world.
Only a few days before the ceremony, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company decided to “get rid” of independent third-party fact-checkers and shift to a “community notes” system based on users’ feedback on disputed content.
This decision raised tough questions regarding user safety on the company’s key, popular platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, as well as the quality of the information we consume, including here in Israel.
If this approach sounds familiar, then it’s because it is almost identical to the model that Elon Musk – Trump’s close ally and donor – introduced at X (formerly Twitter), where the crowd-sourced “Community Notes” mechanism has replaced the policy of actively labeling or removing fake or harmful content by expert checkers.
The ensuing outcome could not be any clearer: a network full of disinformation, antisemitism, violence, and incitement, together with fake and abusive content. The damage that this caused to public safety and democracy has been indisputably evident in Israel over the last year due to the Israel-Hamas War and the ensuing waves of public protest.
Meta's perspective
Zuckerberg’s claims that the new rules prioritize “freedom of expression” are no more than empty slogans designed to sugarcoat the fact that Meta has decided to sacrifice key values, such as user safety and information credibility, on the altar of increased involvement, and to signal that his company is not going to stand in the Trump’s administration’s way in the upcoming term.
Zuckerberg also said in his message that we will see more of what he refers to as “bad stuff” on his social media platforms. This is precisely what will lead to accentuated polarization and incitement within society, undermining trust in institutions and professional authority, while harming the stability of democracies and society as a whole.
In Israel, we have had considerable first-hand experience of such damage on popular networks like X and Telegram. We would do well to remember that human rights – including “freedom of expression” – should be given to humans – not to bots, hostile influence networks, and fake accounts operated by foreign countries and malicious actors, which lately have became more widespread.
Just ask the Iranians, who have been operating unimpeded on these social media networks in Israel for years, intensifying internal friction and factionalism and recruit agents.
IN A WORLD in which disinformation gains traction more rapidly than the facts it buries in an avalanche of fake news, independent fact-checkers have been providing a much-needed protective shield for civilians, even if this has been far from perfect.
Admittedly, this working method has its drawbacks – the checking process is often too long, and dealing with misinformation can give rise to additional issues. Nonetheless, it is clear from Meta’s decision that it prefers to relinquish responsibility for verifying the truth and put it on the users instead.
In doing so, Meta has created a new playing field in which the rich and powerful will have much greater influence in labeling the truth. Though fact-checking is no miracle panacea, it is a vital tool in democracy in which facts and precise information are essential.
In stark contrast to Zuckerberg’s statements – which are thinly disguised efforts to reverberate the rhetoric and messages of both Musk and Trump – fact-checking is certainly not censorship nor is it designed to harm freedom of expression. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Fact-checking provides the all-important context and background to the content and discourse in the public domain. It does so while enabling freedom of expression and opinion in a world that is rapidly sinking in a flood of toxic, deceitful, inflammatory, and fraudulent content.
Fact-checking mechanisms are often forced to contend with thorny challenges of limited scope and impact – only a small handful of content is exposed to checks to verify important facts, among others, due to issues of prioritization and woefully inadequate investment by the platforms.
Now, they have taken one step further, discarding these checks altogether and leaving the users to their own devices to contend, “unarmed,” with the highly polarized, unstable information environment, which is flooded with malicious and manipulative content.
In the struggle against disinformation, Meta has chosen sides. Instead of standing up to this challenge, it has elected to embrace the danger of becoming a platform where a profusion of lies and falsehoods is disseminated with almost no effort.
Just as X has developed into a much less safe and fact-based domain over the last year, so Facebook and Instagram – the largest and most influential social networks in the world – might well turn into nothing more than a pale shadow of X in the Musk era.
All this is occurring at an extremely sensitive and problematic time, with the worrying increase in the use of AI for content creation coupled with the erosion of democratic regimes and the rising intervention of states such as Russia, China, and Iran in ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.
For small and marginal countries with unique languages, such as Israel, the ramifications might be particularly severe, as the platforms invest only limited resources in them for content moderation. In an extremely polarized and unstable country such as Israel, the outcome could easily determine the course of lives.
In the wake of the second Trump administration, these trends should be of concern to anybody wishing to live in a free and democratic society, and among them, and maybe especially, the citizens of Israel.
Social media dominance in the public discourse, the ongoing offensive on established media outlets, and the severe lack of political and security stability are key factors that are making Israeli democracy much more vulnerable and sensitive to the threats posed by false information and malicious foreign influence.
The decision by leading social media networks to follow Trump’s lead and absolve themselves of any responsibility for protecting their users, and the quality of the information they receive via these outlets, could be catastrophic.
For those concerned about the future of democracy in Israel, the battle for facts and truth on social media has never been more important – though now it has become much more complex.
Edan Ring is vice president of community affairs at the Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL). Nitsan Yasur is head of the ISOC-IL Disinformation Resilience training program.