Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his social media platforms which include Facebook and Instagram " will be getting rid of fact-checking partners and replacing them with a "community notes" model like that found on X. For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump's rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking. Disinformation, though, has been a convenient narrative for a Democratic establishment unwilling to reckon with its own role in upholding anti-immigrant narratives, or repeating baseless fearmongering over crime rates, and failing to support the multiracial working class. Long dead is the idea that social media platforms like X or Instagram are either trustworthy news publishers, sites for liberatory community building, or hubs for digital democracy. "The internet may once have been understood as a commons of information, but that was long ago," wrote media theorist Rob Horning in a recent newsletter. "Now the main purpose of the internet is to place its users under surveillance, to make it so that no one does anything without generating data, and to assure that paywalls, rental fees, and other sorts of rents can be extracted for information that may have once seemed free but perhaps never wanted to be." Social media platforms are huge corporations for which we, as users, produce data to be mined as a commodity to sell to advertisers " and government agencies. The CEOs of these corporations are craven and power-hungry.
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