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Zuckerberg has bent the knee to Trump: be afraid, be very afraid

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
4 min readJan 10, 2025
IMAGE: An AI-generated image of Mark Zuckerberg looking stupid and with a MAGA hat
IMAGE: Grok

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision at the behest of Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the FCC, to replace fact-checking on his social networks with a Community Notes-type system like X’s is the latest in a series of moves following the replacement of Nick Clegg by Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as chief global affairs officer to curry favor with the incoming president.

Plus ça change: in a company as appallingly irresponsible as Meta, fact-checking was a joke anyway, relying as it did on poorly developed algorithms and barely observed procedures, and a system based on oversight by the user community will be equally ineffective, and will likely generate even more problems.

Solutions such as X’s Community Notes are not inherently bad, indeed it could be argued that moving from moderators to such a model could be a step in the right direction, because it’s not the job of social networks to check facts. Community participation systems tend to generate greater diversity of perspectives and fewer accusations of ideological or political bias: a…

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Published in Enrique Dans

On the effects of technology and innovation on people, companies and society (writing in Spanish at enriquedans.com since 2003)

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Written by Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)

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