Photo by Christoph Scholz/Flickr

We may all become Americans soon if recurring nightmare Donald Trump has his way, but in the meantime, Meta’s move to stop fact checking user posts in the US may make us even less alike (fact checking of Facebook and Instagram posts in Canada will continue, according to the CBC). Republicans in the US have long complained that Meta’s fact checkers were biased against them and have preferred to instead construct their own version of reality based on what they call “alternative facts.” The root of the problem, as Stephen Colbert once observed, is that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Instead of truth, we get what Colbert called “truthiness,” which is based not so much on facts as on our perceptions, which are much easier to manipulate. No wonder so much of public relations nowadays is perception management, which was perfected by the White House in manufacturing support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely,” said Joel Kaplan, its Chief Global Affairs Officer, in announcing the change last week. “That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression.” Instead of fact checking posts, for which Meta had contracted with outside agencies since 2016, its Facebook and Instagram social networks in the US will henceforth be subject only to appended corrections from readers called Community Notes, similar to what Elon Musk’s X now allows. “Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” explained Kaplan. “A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.” Meta’s........

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