Trump Gets New Propaganda Machine as Mark Zuckerberg Caves on Meta

It’s official: Mark Zuckerberg is turning Meta into yet another propaganda machine for Donald Trump and the far right. 

In a video statement published Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be enacting a series of policy changes purportedly for the purpose of fostering free speech, but his declaration devolved into an explanation of just how spineless he intends to be in the face of a second Trump administration. 

As reasons for allowing more unfettered speech, Zuckerberg declared that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” and that there has been “widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” 

He announced that Meta will end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of community notes. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Zuckberg said.

He also made sure to flag that his decision was a direct response to Trump’s return to the White House. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward prioritizing speech,” he said.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg continued. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

In a statement, Meta referred specifically to Elon Musk’s X, which has essentially become an unusable cesspool of misinformation and hate speech, as an example of the triumph of community notes. 

“We’ve seen this approach work on X—where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” the statement said.

Zuckerberg also declared that Meta would “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” 

His specific reference to these two “topics,” which encompass vulnerable communities often targeted by Trump and other conservatives, signals his complete submission to the far right’s mission to steer public discourse straight into hell. As if the repeated references to the dangers of “legacy media” didn’t indicate that strongly enough. 

Zuckerberg’s statement also demonstrates a willful ignorance of the way misinformation and hate speech about these issues endanger the lives of people offline for the sake of fostering conversation about whether all people should have the rights and dignities of others. Over the summer, Trump’s racist lies about pet-eating immigrants spread across the internet ecosystem like wildfire, and even though they weren’t based on anything at all, they were treated as if they were as worthy as any actual reporting about immigration. This is the kind of internet Zuckerberg said he hopes to foster.

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions; shut down people with different ideas,” he said in his video message. 

Zuckerberg also said he would be changing enforcement measures, relying on users to report potentially harmful content before it could be addressed, and “dialing back” content filters.

“It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “But it will also reduce the number of innocent [people’s] posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

It remains to be seen if allowing more content will extend to LGBTQ-related hashtags, which Meta has reportedly restricted for months.

Zuckerberg spoke openly about hiding political content from users during the election season “because it was making people stressed.” But now that an authoritarian is coming into power, it seems the billionaire has changed his tune. “It feels like we’re in a new era now,” Zuckerberg explained, saying that “civic content” would be phased back in across Meta’s platforms.  

During an appearance Tuesday on Fox & Friends, Meta policy chief Joel Kaplan made it clear that the decision to roll back restrictions was a direct response to Trump. “There is a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values,” he said. 

Zuckerberg’s feckless kowtowing comes one day after Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, one of Trump’s close allies, would be joining the company’s board of directors. 

Trump’s biggest congressional obstacle may be MAGA diehards.

Trump and the hard-right House Freedom Caucus have been politically misaligned of late, according to reporting from Punchbowl News. The rift began when some caucus members chose to endorse Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley over Trump way back in the GOP primary. It’s only gotten worse since then.

During last week’s Speaker debacle, the Freedom Caucus Ralph Norman and Keith Self had to be personally lobbied over the phone by the president-elect himself to begrudgingly cast their votes for Mike Johnson. And they also seem to have a problem with how Trump’s congressional liaison and former HFC member James Braid is conducting funding negotiations, taking issue with his calling in to a meeting to lobby members on freezing the debt ceiling. This was the same day 38 Republicans, many of whom were Freedom Caucus members, defied Trump and voted against the Continuing Resolution he had endorsed.

The debt ceiling keeps coming up as a major point of contention between Trump and HFC, as its members don’t seem to believe that Trump is serious about making the $2 trillion of budget cuts that Trump and billionaire friend Elon Musk have been talking about for months. This recent pattern of disagreement shows that the HFC won’t be so quick to blindly do Trump’s bidding—which could cause him some major problems on the way to getting his “big, beautiful bill” passed.

Amazon is paying Melania Trump a hefty amount of cash to produce a documentary about her.

Puck reports that the media and retail giant is releasing a documentary about the once and soon-to-be first lady as part of a whopping $40 million deal—a staggering amount of money for any figure, let alone one who commands relatively little public interest. It will be directed by Brett Ratner, who hasn’t made a Hollywood movie since being accused of sexual harassment by multiple women in 2017.

The deal includes the documentary, which will be released in theaters and later on Prime Video, and a short documentary series of two to three episodes to follow up on the film. Amazon outbid rivals Disney and Paramount for streaming rights to the project, and Trump stands to receive a hefty amount of cash in the deal.

The Amazon deal raises questions about some of executive chairman Jeff Bezos’s decisions in the last few months. In late October, the Bezos-owned Washington Post refused to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election, spiking an editorial that would have backed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Following Trump’s election victory, the billionaire posted a fawning message of congratulations on X, hailing Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback.” Last month, Bezos joined the many wealthy donors to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee by pledging to contribute $1 million, giving him the perk of six tickets to pre-inauguration events, including a black-tie ball, a candlelight dinner with Trump and his wife, and a reception with Cabinet nominees.

Did Bezos make all of these gestures because of the streaming deal he made with the president-elect’s wife? Or are these overtures and the deal part of a new strategy from Bezos to avoid being attacked by Trump? Either way, Bezos and Trump don’t seem to be enemies anymore.

Donald Trump is somehow still harping on his vanity projects to acquire Greenland and Canada, and every day, the trolling feels more real.

In a Truth Social post Monday night, the president-elect published some propaganda to make it seem as if the people of Greenland were completely onboard with his plan to acquire the world’s largest island.

“I am hearing that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA,’” Trump wrote. “My son, Don Jr, and various representatives, will be traveling there to visit some of the most magnificent areas and sights. Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation. We will protect it, and cherish it, from a very vicious outside World. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”

It’s not clear that Trump’s oldest son has any plans to meet with officials while in Greenland, but it’s always nice to share your kid’s vacation plans.

Beneath the post, Trump shared the video of an unidentified man in a MAGA hat urging Trump to buy Greenland. “We don’t want to be colonized by the Danish government anymore,” the man said, as he requested a new colonizer.

“We are the richest nation in the world, and we don’t get to use it! Denmark’s using us too much,” he continued, implying that through purchase, the wealth of Denmark would somehow return to Greenland’s small population of 57,000 people and not disappear into the imperialist machine Trump hopes to steer.

Greenland has long sought independence from Denmark, and all of Trump’s ramblings about buying the place seem to have revitalized that conversation. But that doesn’t mean the people of Greenland would have any interest in becoming part of the United States. Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede recently expressed his desire for “ownership and control” over the island, but reiterated that the country isn’t for sale.

Meanwhile, billionaire technocrat Elon Musk cheered Trump’s efforts to convince people that Greenland wants to be part of the U.S., writing in a post on X, “The people of Greenland should decide their future and I think they want to be part of America!”

It’s worth noting that Musk owns the exact kind of popular opinion machine that might work to generate this kind of sentiment, and Trump has a tendency to turn his tedious trolling into reality through sheer repetition and normalization.

Trump’s idea to acquire the territory, which is not only of great strategic importance to the U.S. but contains a wealth of natural resources and minerals, isn’t popular with everyone.

Jim Townsend, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on NATO and Arctic defense policy, told Politico that Trump’s statements are resulting in a diplomatic headache. “Pissing everybody off by saying we’re just going to buy them outright really bruises our bilateral relationship with the Danes and more importantly ruins any kind of way for us to work this out with Greenlanders,” said Townsend.

Trump also doubled down on his outlandish pitch to make Canada the fifty-first state of the U.S. Monday, following the news that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would be resigning.

Canadian M.P. Charlie Angus was quick to nip Trump’s trolling in the bud. “Canada has something called democracy. It means the leader is accountable to Parliament and can be replaced,” he wrote. “I bet Americans wish they had that now.

“And convicted sexual abusers don’t get to lead our nation. We’re decent folk,” Angus said. “Ps. Button up. We’re sending frigid cold your way. love Canada.”

Incoming State Department spokesperson and former Fox News host Tammy Bruce has spent years insulting her new boss, Marco Rubio.

Politico reported at least seven instances of Bruce making a mockery of Senator Rubio, whom Trump has nominated for secretary of state.

In 2014, Bruce referred to Rubio as an “inexperienced senator who’s never run a thing in his life.” The next year she lambasted him as an establishment insider. In 2016 she called him “the kid waving frantically in the back of room trying to prove relevance.” And that same year she admitted to muting him on X.

Bruce has since changed her tune, saying that she’s “thrilled” to be working alongside Rubio. But even if she’s being sincere, her past feelings are another example of the very real rift that exists between the more traditional conservative and the MAGA wings of the GOP.