Zuckerberg vs. Democracy

In January 2025, Meta announced the end of fact-checking and rollback of content moderation policies, including hate speech protections. In an op-ed, Yaёl Eisenstat, a senior fellow at Cybersecurity for Democracy — part of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity — says this is part of Zuckerberg's pattern of yielding to political pressure, specifically to gain Trump's help against regulators. She warns that the focus on fact-checking reductions obscures the bad effects of Meta’s algorithmic amplification of harmful content, and that extremism and hate-filled content will likely increase. “It is up to the public to change their relationship with these companies,” she says. “We must finally insist on transparency about how these systems truly affect our lives…”