There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t treat the mainstream media as the enemy. He even let me, a card carrier of media heritage, into his home. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear his plans to do the right thing. This is part of my years of Facebook embedding to write a book. Over the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company has been criticized for its failure to curb disinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder has a plan to solve it.

As for the solution, he told me, is more content moderation. He will hire more people to vet the posts, even if it costs Facebook a lot of capital. He will also increase efforts to use artificial intelligence to proactively remove harmful content. “It’s not enough to give people the tools to say what they want and then just let our community flag them and try to respond after the fact,” he told me as we sat in his sunroom. “We need to get in there and play a more active role.” He admits he was slow to realize how harmful toxic content is on Facebook, but now he’s committed to fixing the problem, even if it takes years. “I think we did the right thing,” he told me, “It’s just that we should have done it earlier.”

Seven years later, Zuckerberg no longer thinks moderation is the right thing. on a five-minute Reelhe described his actions in support of it as a regrettable caveat to the government’s speculation on Covid and other topics. He announced a shift away from content moderation — no longer actively removing and curtailing misinformation and hate speech — and the end of a fact-checking program aimed at debunking circulating lies. on his platforms. Fact checks on reliable sources will be replaced by “community notes,” a crowdsourcing method where users provide alternative views on the authenticity of posts. That technique is exactly what he told me in 2018 that was “not enough.” While he admits now that his changes will allow “a lot of bad things,” he says that by 2025 it’s worth it for more “free expression” to flourish.

The policy change is one of several moves that show that, even if Zuckerberg wants to do it all, Meta is positioning itself to align with the new Trump administration. You’ve heard the litany, which has become a meme in itself. Meta promoted its top lobbyist, former GOP operative Joel Kaplan, to chief global affairs officer; he then appeared on Fox News (and only Fox News) to announce the new policies. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta will move employees who write and review content from California to Texas, to “help remove concerns that biased employees are over-censoring content.” He dismantled the DEI program in Meta. (Where’s Sheryl Sandberg, so proud of Meta’s various endeavors. Sheryl? Sheryl?) And Meta changed some of its terms of service specifically to allow users demeaning LGBTQ people.

Now that it’s been a week since Meta’s return—and the first one i took of Zuckerberg’s speech—one aspect in particular bothered me: He seemed to be undermining the basic practice of classic journalism, describing it as little more than unreported observations from podcasters, influencers, and countless others. random people on his platforms. This is implied in his Reel when he repeatedly uses the term “legacy media” as a pejorative: a force that, in his view, encourages censorship and stifles freedom of expression. All this time I thought the opposite!

One sign of his revised version of reliability comes from the shift from fact-checkers to community notes. It’s true that the fact-checking process is bad—in part because Zuckerberg didn’t defend the checkers when nasty critics accused them of bias. It is also reasonable to expect that community notes are a useful signal that a post may be incorrect. But the power of refutation fails when the participants in the conversation reject the idea that disagreements can be resolved through convincing evidence. That’s a core difference between fact-checking—which Zuckerberg removed—and the community notes he implemented. Seeing the truth of the world says that the definitive truths, reached through research, talking to people, and sometimes even trusting your own eyes, can be determined. The trick is to identify the authorities who have earned the public’s trust by maintaining the truth. The notes community welcomes alternative views—but the judgment of which is trustworthy is up to you. There is something to the canard that an antidote to bad speech is more speech. But if verifiable facts cannot successfully refute the easily debunked flapdoodle, we are stuck in a suicidal quicksand of babel.

That’s the world that Donald Trump, Zuckerberg’s new model, knows. 60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl once asked Trump why is he insulting journalists who are just doing their job. “You know why I did this?” he replied. “I did this to embarrass you all and embarrass you all so that if you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.” In 2021, Trump further revealed he intends to benefit from the attack on the truth. “If you say it enough and say it, they will start believing you,” he said at a rally. A consequence of that is if social media promotes lies enough, people will believe them too. Especially when previously recognized authorities are discredited and undermined.