Mark Zuckerberg’s dismissal of Facebook’s fact-checkers and his replacement of them with a “community notes” approach pioneered by Elon Musk at X (formerly Twitter) signals the end of an aberrant era in American politics that began shortly after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016. The era of trying to manage American political outcomes by having social media superintend, rather than facilitate, political debate is over.
Social media companies were wrongly held up as the instigators and vanguard of progressive political change when used by activists in the Middle East a decade and a half ago, and when the Obama ... |