We have to admit: we didn't see it coming. When we decided to leave X with Valigia Blu’s account, even before Trump's victory, we also decided to continue using Mark Zuckerberg's social media platforms - yes, they are owned by Zuckerberg, it would be naive to believe that Meta is not in his full control. Continuing to use Facebook and Instagram was not a decision dictated by the fact that they were far from under scrutiny. But we stayed because the owners had not actively compromised with the regime and Trumpian ideology. Which at its core is a brutal view of human relations and human rights, an absolute and authoritarian concept of power, contempt for the main democratic institutions, and a propaganda machine that has no qualms about spreading disinformation and exploiting hate speech, even if it means endangering the lives of millions of citizens.

Then came Mark Zuckerberg's video announcement, and everything changed. Not because he decided to do away with the Third-Party Fact-Checking Program (3PFC), entrusted to professionals paid by Meta. From the beginning, we were very sceptical about the operation, which was born under the pressure of a confused and controversial debate about the alleged role of fake news in Trump’s 2016 victory.

Zuckerberg made a number of false claims about the impact of fact-checking, branding the system used by Meta as ‘censorship’. To do so, he omitted reports (internal or commissioned by the company) that contradicted what he said in the video, and he misrepresented both the functioning of the fact-checking program and, above all, the guidelines that fact-checkers are obliged to follow.

Here are a couple of examples. Firstly, content that was tagged as 'false' or 'misleading' was not removed, it was simply labelled as such. So there was never any real censorship. The spread of content was contained by limiting its virality. But why should the right to speak go hand in hand with the right to reach as many people as possible? Moreover, there was and still is a list of untouchable VIPs - such as media personalities, political leaders, and entrepreneurs. A digital élite of high-profile users that enjoys a kind of immunity from any form of restriction.

According to BuzzFeed News, Zuckerberg had personally intervened in 2019 to protect far-right users, including InfoWars founder Alex Jones. As one Facebook employee reported: "Mark didn't like the punishment, so he changed the rules", allowing a wide range of far-right extremist groups to remain on Facebook and organise ahead of the 6 January 2021 uprising. As a consequence, the company was forced to take more serious action, but many of these efforts were short-lived.

"Instead of blaming fact-checkers, Zuckerberg should just admit he’s changing the rules to reflect Trump’s political agenda and will tune the algorithms so that Trump can build a base on Facebook and Instagram, after Musk paved the way on X", writes in the Guardian Joan Donovan, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Boston University and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute.

Zuckerberg's claims about how Facebook should go back to its origins to better defend freedom of expression are truly hilarious. The story of Facebook's origins is quite different. Named after the list of students distributed at the beginning of the academic year (Face Book), the site was created in 2004 by Zuckerberg and some colleagues from Harvard University. It was an outline of a social network designed to rate the physical appearance of female students. To achieve this, Zuckerberg hacked the university's security system by copying ID photos. When he was discovered, he received a disciplinary warning and was forced to shut down the website.

The decisions announced will not guarantee more freedom of expression. On the contrary, they pave the way for a return to Facebook's more misogynistic origins. In a statement, Meta announced that moderation policies would be aligned with “mainstream discourse”, particularly on topics such as gender and immigration - two topics that Trump and Musk pushed hard during the 2025 campaign. As a result of this change, it is now allowed to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill" or to vilify immigrants.

Joan Donovan writes::

It’s a telltale sign of technofascism when our communication systems are disrupted by changes in political power after every election. Protection for vulnerable groups online continues to depend on the political ambitions of the CEO or owner of social media platforms. This is further proof that social media is not a free speech machine. Never was. Instead, content moderation is the core product of social media, where algorithms decide if speech is visible, at what volume, and if there will be counter-speech. Contrary to Zuckerberg’s claims, it wasn’t the fact-checkers that ruined Meta products. It’s always been insider political operatives, including Clegg, Sandberg and Kaplan, who turned social media into a new frontier for the culture wars.

The radicalisation of Mark Zuckerberg

The shutdown of the Third Party Fact-Checking Program only affects the US for now, but the path seems to be set for Europe as well. Connecting the dots, I believe the picture that emerges leaves no room for doubt: we are faced with a staunch adherence to a system of power and a precise political vision.

In early 2021, Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister and head of public affairs at Meta, signed off on the decision to ban Trump indefinitely after he used the company's platform to promote his attacks on Capitol Hill. Zuckerberg said at the time that "the risks of allowing the president to continue using our service" were "simply too great". Clegg was replaced on 2 January by Joel Kaplan, a hard-line Republican and former chief of staff to President George Bush. Immediately after Zuckerberg's video announcement, Kaplan rushed to Fox News to celebrate the company's policy changes, even giving Trump a shout-out.

In addition to appointing Kaplan, Zuckerberg flew to Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with Trump; donated $1 million to the President's inauguration fund; had Dana White - CEO and president of UFC, the world's leading mixed martial arts organisation, and a close friend of Trump - join Meta's board of directors; ordered the end of the company's diversity, inclusion and equity programmes; and even had Messenger's LGBTQ+ themes removed.

For New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, who covers technology and digital culture, these changes also reflect Zuckerberg's deep and radical political shift. Roose writes:

A wealthy 40-year-old man with a sullied public reputation starts listening to Joe Rogan and develops an interest in mixed martial arts and other hypermasculine hobbies, grows annoyed by the woke left and angry at the mainstream media, rebrands himself as a bad boy, and adopts the label of a “classical liberal” while quietly supporting most of the tenets of MAGA conservatism.

Last September, the New York Times published a profile of Zuckerberg which, as Paris Marx wrote in the Disconnect newsletter, gives a pretty clear picture of some of the factors driving his political realignment:

It describes Zuckerberg as being fed up with political backlash, but holding far more ire toward progressive politicians and employees at his philanthropic group than the right-wing political figures who also had him in their crosshairs. In particular, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pushed back on employees who expected their initiative to do more in response to the killing of George Floyd and the overturning of abortion rights in the United States. Zuckerberg reportedly now sees himself as a libertarian or “classical liberal,” who abhors regulation and “far-left progressivism” like pro-Palestine campus protests, which he and Chan consider antisemitic.

Shortly after announcing radical changes to the moderation of his platforms, Zuckerberg appeared on the podcast of Joe Rogan, the former comedian and later commentator for the Ultimate Fight Championship.

Rogan has created one of the most listened-to podcasts in the world, The Joe Rogan Experience, which has had a massive impact on American public opinion. Each episode, which averages three hours on Spotify, attracts millions and millions of listeners with famous and not-so-famous guests, including actors, politicians, athletes, scientists and many often controversial figures, including vaccine opponents, conspiracy theorists and deniers of various stripes. During the election campaign, Rogan publicly expressed his support for Trump and described himself as “anti-establishment”. Thanks to a format of very informal and unconventional conversations, Rogan has managed to win over a cross-section of young adult viewers.

During the interview with Rogan, Zuckerberg used typical Trumpian language against the mainstream media on several occasions. He criticised the Biden administration for lobbying against misinformation on COVID. Referring to the now-defunct DEI policy, he said it had "neutered" companies when he thought there should be more "masculine energy". He added: "I think a culture that celebrates aggression a little bit more has its merits, which are really positive." Finally, he openly asked Trump to protect American platforms from EU fines (last year, Meta was fined €797 million for breaking antitrust rules on advertising services)."I think it's a strategic advantage for the US to have some of the strongest companies in the world," Zuckerberg said."It should be part of the American strategy to defend that primacy," essentially defining European competition rules as a kind of protectionist duty applied to US companies.

The biggest game: the attack against news and democracy

The old media and politics bear a huge responsibility for today's situation. Media critics such as Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Emily Bell and Margaret Sullivan have criticised - and continue to criticise - the American media and its failure to cover the radicalisation of the Republican Party.

Sullivan herself wrote on the day of Trump's inauguration:

The big story, of course, is what’s happening today at noon in Washington, DC: The inauguration of Donald Trump, a notorious conman, liar and would-be autocrat; and with that, all the societal ills that caused his reelection. Among them are a poorly educated and under-informed electorate, racism, misogyny, the growth of a right-wing information sphere — and yes, the failures of the mainstream media, who too often made it their business to present Trump as a normal candidate instead of a dire, even existential, threat to a nation ruled by law.

In 2014, in a lecture I gave at the University of Urbino, I highlighted critical issues that have only deepened today, leaving us almost completely defenceless in the face of this attack on information. In this context, when I speak of information, I do not mean simply the mainstream media; I’m talking about a complex digital ecosystem in which people live, inform themselves and consume. The attack on this ecosystem also includes discrediting and diminishing the importance of professional fact-checking, which is at the heart of real journalism that respects facts and serves the public interest. 

The need for correct information is not a left-wing or a right-wing idea. It is the minimum basis for a decent public discussion, a lowest common denominator without which there is only the arrogance and prevarication of those who can impose their voice on that of others because they have more political or economic power.

Historian Eoin Higgins writes:

In this modern media and political environment, though, billionaire whining is directing how the country works. Zuckerberg and other tech titans are invested in shaping political media to their own ends to further their ideology, all while ensuring they have influence over the national security state’s allocation of resources.

Several studies on disinformation provide even more tools to place Zuckerberg and Meta's decisions in a broader and even more disturbing context. Contrary to popular belief, disinformation is not a universal and general condition of our media ecosystem. In fact, it is specifically associated with far-right populist parties and groups that use disinformation as a political strategy. They exploit the collapse of trust in democratic institutions by using and relying on propaganda and disinformation to destabilise mainstream politics. Disinformation and right-wing populism must be seen as inextricably linked and synergistic. Disinformation is therefore not a structural feature of the system: it is a political project of the far right.

In this context, Mark Zuckerberg hasn't chosen to contribute to a "more open and connected" world, as he said at the beginning of his adventure. He has chosen to make the world more chaotic and confused, giving free rein to propaganda, disinformation and hate speech.

To be clear, disinformation is not the main cause of polarisation in the US or elsewhere. Debates about disinformation have sometimes given too much credence to the idea that algorithms are almighty shapers of reality, and have failed to take into account the fact that people will always seek information that is consistent with their worldview. Their demand for such information, whether true or false, could be the most important factor in the creation and spread of misinformation itself.

As Casey Newton, founder and director of Platformer, wrote, “It’s possible to believe that a total fixation on misinformation is counterproductive and also believe in the idea of harm reduction: that sophisticated systems that accurately identify hoaxes and then show them to fewer people ought to be left in place.” The consequences could be devastating to the lives of millions of people.

A former employee who worked in this area during their time at the company was very clear with Newton: "I can't tell you how much damage comes from content that is not illegal but harmful" they said. The systems that Zuckerberg has now decided to disable have significantly reduced the spread of hate movements on Meta's platforms. "This is not the climate change debate, or pro-life vs. pro-choice. This is degrading, horrible content that leads to violence and that has the intent to harm other people."

The French newspaper Le Monde, which announced its decision to stop publishing its content on X and to keep a close eye on TikTok and Meta, described the alliance between Donald Trump and the heads of social media platforms as a "global threat":

This unprecedented alliance not only poses a major threat to US democracy, [...] but also a far-reaching confusion between general and private interests. Made up of media and social platform owners, this "oligarchy" of "extreme wealth, power and influence," in the words of outgoing president Joe Biden on January 15, who was unsuccessful in opposing it, also represents a global threat to free access to reliable information.

Valigia Blu was one of the first news outlets in the world to decide to stop using X, then others followed, including The Guardian and Le Monde. And let us hope that democratic institutions, politicians and other media will soon take the same decision to stop feeding a propaganda machine of disinformation, propaganda and hatred. 

The assault on information and democracy has only just begun. On Inauguration Day, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency (memecoin), with consequences we cannot even imagine. As Felix Salmon wrote on Axios, “The emoluments clause of the Constitution [which prohibits anyone holding government office from accepting gifts or securities from foreign leaders or governments, NdA], written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.” Salmon also pointed out that there is no way to track purchases of this currency, which means that it will be a way for those who want something from Trump to transfer money directly to him. This is like the 47th President of the United States of America owning an unmonitored private bank.

After the way Trump's inauguration day went, with the leading representatives of American tech companies in the front row applauding several - even disturbing - passages of Trump's speech peppered with rants and lies, and Elon Musk's Nazi salutes, there’s no more doubt. Franz Russo is right, the photo of the four Big Tech super-rich together paying tribute to Trump, whom they had criticised in 2016 and tried to distance themselves from, speaks for itself:

The current Silicon Valley wants to be a protagonist and no longer a secondary presence waiting for a green light from politics. Silicon Valley is now a power centre. Whereas before tech companies tried to remain neutral or influence policy decisions through lobbying and donations, we are now seeing direct involvement. The inclusion of Elon Musk in Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a striking example of how the boundaries between the public and private sectors are dissolving. All the people in the photo are heads of companies on which the fate of the internet and the digital world has depended for years. But now there is more. It is on these companies that the fate of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and information now depends.

On Inauguration Day, the tech leaders who run X, Meta, Amazon and Google had better seats than members of government, governors and other officials. The message of this election is hard to miss.

Much more than in his first term, the ultra-rich - and tech billionaires in particular - are embracing Trump and his world. There is a very good chance that Trump's second term in the White House will be characterised by personal negotiations and deals with corporate and tech executives - a new kind of American oligarchy.

It is time to build a new home for our online communities

I have been an activist in the use of social networking since its early days. And it was clear to me from the beginning that journalists and media organisations should be where the people are. But most media and journalists have never experienced the enormous potential of these spaces for communities and public discourse. Cynically and opportunistically, they have used social media in broadcast mode, top-down, spreading mostly soft news, low quality content, to generate traffic and money, without caring about the communities of readers - not even moderating comments, for example. They have shown contempt for their own readers and contributed to the general degradation of online conversations.

Thanks to social media, we have been able to hear more voices, and where there are more voices to be heard, there is more democracy and more freedom. We have seen the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, #metoo... And despite the obvious and objective criticism, I still thought it was worth it. But in the last few years, everything has changed. The premises on which they were born and transformed our digital lives have been betrayed.

Now the scenario is completely upside down. We had greeted the advent of social media as the era of disintermediation: a liberation from the oligopoly of mainstream media that decided who could and could not have a voice in public debate. The "publish-without-permission" button not only made us freer, it gave us enormous power that we could not have imagined before. Within a few years, we ended up in the hands of a handful of power-hungry, money-hungry, unscrupulous oligarchs blinded by libertarian ideology.

With Valigia Blu, after leaving X as soon as Musk turned Twitter into a propaganda machine fueled by disinformation and hatred towards more vulnerable communities, we decided to leave Meta too after Zuckerberg's announcements.

Not because he has abandoned fact-checking or the DEI programme. But because, like Musk, he has decided to put his kingdom - where we are voiceless subjects who delude ourselves into thinking we have a voice - at the service of a repugnant ideology.

Zuckerberg has always tried to pander to the political power of the day in the name of the god of money. But today we are playing a very different game, where the rules are completely blown apart and increasingly opaque. Today, the decision to pander to the political power embodied by Trump is certainly made out of economic interests, but also out of ideological adherence. Economic interests and ideological convictions coincide, and Zuckerberg can finally take off the mask he has been wearing for years.

Do we really want to continue to be pawns in this dark and sick game? To suffer the indignity of being cogs that feed these machines with our presence, our content, our active participation in discussions, our likes?

We want to be consistent with the history of Valigia Blu. Valigia Blu was born about 15 years ago, under the impetus of a citizens' mobilisation to demand the correction of a false news item broadcast by the main Italian public service news programme. This mobilisation then grew into a cultural project centred on good information practices and, above all, on people.

Now, to be consistent with this history and with our community, we have a duty to try to find other ways of being together. We need to release energy and creative vision to explore new ways of managing our individual and collective digital lives. With our own rules, without compromise, and inspired by the same ethical principles that led to the birth of a project that has always been so “unconventional” for the mainstream media system.

Rebuild our digital homes. This is what we want to do.

When it was born, Valigia Blu overturned certain dynamics that seemed impossible to unhinge in Italy. Today, Valigia Blu has grown, constantly measuring itself with its community, also through crowdfunding, which for 10 years has guaranteed the (niche) project a non-profit sustainability and through which those who read us, follow us and participate in our discussions.

Today we must once again turn the table, stop thinking that there is no alternative to these platforms. We must rebuild spaces for conversation where we are in control.

The path ahead for us is clear and involves a transition that will last a year. The time it takes to rebuild our home and be able to welcome those who want to make this new stage of the journey with us.

In the coming months, we will be inviting people to subscribe to our newsletter and Telegram channel, and to follow us on BlueSky, Mastodon and LinkedIn. Leaving Meta also frees up a lot of our energy to be used elsewhere.

The Valigia Blu website must once again become the home of our digital experience. We will soon deactivate the possibility of commenting on our Facebook/Instagram accounts. Those who wish to comment on our articles and participate in the discussion will be able to do so without restriction. There will be no pre-moderation; we trust those who frequent our spaces, but moderation will be there as always. Pre-moderation will only be activated at times when we are not present.

Valigia Blu Community, the Facebook group with almost 2,000 members, made up of people who donate at least 20 euros each year and ask to join, will be moved to the website. We will create a portal with similar functions to the Facebook group.

We will develop a Valigia Blu app with the possibility of activating notifications to keep up to date.

All this requires time, which we are willing to devote, and investment, which we are able to make thanks to crowdfunding.

It is time to rethink our digital communities, to decide for ourselves how we want to be in these shared online spaces. We are not interested in boycotting, we are not political opponents of Musk and Zuckerberg. Not least because we are already algorithmically and culturally irrelevant within these platforms.

Our digital lives, just like our physical ones, deserve to be protected, nurtured, not subjected to constant stress, abuse, violence and provocation. This does not mean denying the reality of tension and conflict that is inevitable in human relationships, and in some ways necessary and beneficial - the confrontation and clash of ideas allows for growth, improvement, progress. It means defining a framework within which all this can be done civilly and with full mutual respect.

We are aware that this will be an arduous journey, full of obstacles. But it is also a new, important, beautiful and exciting challenge. We will need sharing, support and collective intelligence.

This will also require an effort on the part of the reading community to rethink their habits in terms of how they inform themselves and 'live' their digital dimension. Several of the comments we have received in the last few days about the decision we are about to take spoke of the difficulty of getting information other than by scrolling through Facebook. It is hard to actively seek out information outside this fence. It is difficult to actively go to the Valigia Blu website.

Some people only read Valigia Blu articles when they appear “by chance” in their feed. And this is really problematic and worrying. We are faced with an invasive dynamic that has deeply affected us and completely disrupted our behaviour, to the point where we rely on the algorithm or chance for our information diet. We are talking about the information we need to orient ourselves in the world.

The term “enshittification”, coined by journalist and author Cory Doctorow, perfectly captures our experience of these platforms. “In the beginning, a company behaves well towards its end users and thus binds them to its services,” Doctorow said to Italian newspaper Repubblica. “Then it starts to degrade the user experience and prioritise business customers. Once it has secured their loyalty, it begins to satisfy only the interests of its shareholders, leaving behind what is necessary for users and business customers to remain tied to services they can no longer do without.” We are in a trap, a toxic and abusive relationship, many of us even fully aware of the trap but unable to escape. 

Doctorow further explained:

These corporations are monopolies, and many people are susceptible to conspiracy messages because those who should protect them do not. The truth is that there is a great conspiracy: that of the rich, who have accumulated more wealth, corrupted institutions, devastated our planet and eroded workers' rights. [...] Social media platforms have tried to take over blogging. First, they offered us a great traffic stream, then they took it away and tried to make us pay for it again. Or they just destroyed us, one way or another. We were naive to fall for it; we should have seen it coming: if you put yourself at the mercy of a company, it will never be merciful to you [...] So many are returning to platforms like Substack, not so much because of the ethics of the operators, which remain rather questionable, but because it is easier to leave and take everything with you: the site's subscribers, their campaigns, the benefits of the platforms. But a blog remains the best way to build a stable online career: even if you lose the amplification of the message that comes from a platform, you gain the autonomy of not being at the mercy of anyone.

Major crises stimulate creativity. It is not true that there are no alternatives, pursuing them indeed requires effort, commitment, cleverness and even some sacrifice. There is certainly a cost, but given what is at stake, it is worth it.

More recently, the “Free Our Feeds” campaign was launched. It aims to use Bluesky's technology to create a social media ecosystem that rethinks social media as a public good.

Iscriviti alla nostra Newsletter

Consenso all’invio della newsletter: Dai il tuo consenso affinché Valigia Blu possa usare le informazioni che fornisci allo scopo di inviarti la newsletter settimanale e una comunicazione annuale relativa al nostro crowdfunding.

HP

Come revocare il consenso: Puoi revocare il consenso all’invio della newsletter in ogni momento, utilizzando l’apposito link di cancellazione nella email o scrivendo a info@valigiablu.it. Per maggiori informazioni leggi l’informativa privacy su www.valigiablu.it.

Zuckerberg is right to say that it is time to get back to basics. But for us, the real return to the origins of this wonderful and complex adventure called "the web" is to leave his platforms, to return home, where the promise of a more connected and democratic world is truly a guiding, heartfelt and profound value. Not a hypocritical slogan to make billions and accumulate power at the expense of our democracy.

Cover image: JD Lasica from Pleasanton, CA, US, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons