Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of Congress, staring blankly through his humanoid eyes.
Slowly, robotically, he lifted a glass of water to his face. "Remember to drink water," his programming seemed to say. "Real humans like water."
Mark Zuckerberg, you see, is a cyborg. He may look like like a human, albeit in an uncanny valley kind of way. He can even mimic human speech patterns in much the way Chat GPT can, though sometimes the programming slips as it famously did when he declared: "I was human, er, I am human, still."
Be in no doubt though, that the man who sat before the US senate in 2018 and declared he'd stamp out fake news on Facebook is a cybernetic organism. This is agreed upon by most of the internet which, according to Meta's new policies, makes it true.
"We will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it."
In short, rather than third party fact checkers identifying potential fake news, it will be users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads who decide whether or not it's true.
This would seem rather an abrupt turn from admitting before the Senate that "we didn't do enough" to combat fake news, political interference and hate speech but that may have something to do with the re-election of one Donald J Trump.
In 2020 Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, donated $400m to election offices, which the President-elect and his MAGA base viewed as an attempt to rig the vote.
Read More:
-
Luigi Mangione is an accused murderer - so why does the internet love him so much?
-
As advertisers and users flee, what comes next for Elon Musk and Twitter?
-
Why Facebook and Instagram are in hot water over AI profiles
"We are watching him closely," Trump said in a book published in August last year. "If he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison."
Though the Facebook founder is incapable of feeling fear, or indeed any other emotion, on account of being a cyborg it appears the threat had the desired effect.
During the Presidential campaign Meta's corporate political action committee did not give to either major candidate, while down ballot donations were split between both parties.
After Trump was elected he received personal congratulations from Zuckerberg, while Meta donated $1m to his inauguration fund.
The company's head of global policy, Nick Clegg, was quickly thrown under the MAGA bus to be replaced by Republican insider Joel Kaplan. The former Liberal Democrat leader had been in place since 2018, having stood down from frontline politics in the wake of a disastrous 2015 election campaign which saw him recreate the video to Carly Rae Jepsen's 'I Really Like You', a spot which was deemed so cringeworthy it has never been released. If Zuckerberg is worried about online censorship perhaps he could start there: the people want the Jepsen cut.
While Meta's new policies will apply across its platforms, its impact is most likely to be felt on Facebook, which was founded by Zuckerberg when he was a student at Harvard University.
Though Gen Z grew up being told that the internet would melt their brains, it's the older generation who struggle most identifying misinformation. A 2019 paper entitled Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook found that, even controlling for political affiliation, social media users over 65 shared almost seven times as many fake news sources as 18-29-year-olds.
Facebook's most engaged audience is the over 55s, who make up around a quarter of its users, and one only has to look at the demographics of those who appear to have been radicalised by the various culture wars to see the effect in action.
Indeed, an EU-funded research project which is now in its second year is investigating what characteristics of social media send people in their mid-40s to mid-60s down extremist rabbit holes. One theory holds that the middle-aged were introduced to the internet as adults, and as a result their understanding of the online space is largely self-taught and self-regulated.
Of course, Facebook is far from the only company looking to curry favour with the MAGA emperor. Apple CEO Tim Cook has donated $1m to Trump's inauguration fund, as have Uber, Amazon and OpenAI.
Then, of course, there's the fluffer-in-chief, Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk.
Accounts belonging to white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux were un-banned, as well as British far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins.
The site has also been overrun by bots, with an analysis of the first Republican primary debate in 2023 identifying a network of 1,305 bot accounts backing false claims from real users that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump.
The state of the platform has led to a number of both private and public bodies leaving, including Renfrewshire Council this week, while Musk has been using his profile to launch repeated attacks on the UK government.
The billionaire spent $277m backing Trump's election campaign and has been rewarded with a position on the advisory 'Department of Government Efficiency' or 'DOGE', named for an internet meme.
Musk and Zuckerberg's claims about taking things out of the hands of fact-checkers might sound good on paper, and there's clearly a balance to be struck between freedom of expression and moderation of content.
Unfortunately this 'voice of the people' approach to fact checking runs into quite a serious barrier when one considers that some things are just incontrovertibly true or false - 2+2 = 4 regardless of how many people may believe it's five.
Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election, millions of people aren't dropping dead because of Covid vaccines, the world isn't run by a cabal of cannibalistic, Satanic, child molesters. Millions of people may believe those things to be true, it doesn't mean they are.
There is, of course, a deep irony in the people who made a catchphrase of "facts don't care about your feelings" being so alarmed when faced with reality but, like it or not, social media is how a lot of people find news - 47% of adults in the UK according to the latest Ofcom figures.
Such platforms being in the hands of Zuckerberg or Musk - who openly disdains what he calls 'the MSM' - means the algorithms can be adjusted to their own particular whims. After Musk endorsed Trump in July, his posts received 138% more views, with other Republican leaning accounts also seeing a boost.
Traditional media isn't immune to this, it must be said, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ordering the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013, not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in close to four decades.
Unlike bot farms on social media though, the Post remains constrained by things such as defamation laws and data protection - try suing an AI algorithm that lies about you.
Community notes may give the impression that what's allowed is in the hands of the users, but in reality it's the domain of very wealthy men. Or cyborgs.
