Remembering Carter, Biden’s truth deficit, and Zuckerberg’s choice to raise the risk of genocide

Good evening from Washington, where I am still learning and relearning the lesson not to compose newsletters in the content management system. If you're reading this, you're subscribed to the first edition of Civic Texts in the year.

Buckle up: I have a few things to say!

Remembering Carter

Last night, I joined a long queue of Americans wrapping around 2nd Street waiting to pay our respects to President Carter at 11 PM on a frigid January night. Our assembled masses spoke volumes about Washington, Washingtonians, and the impact of this deceased patriot that we were all there, together. At 11:34, the Capitol Police estimated to me that it would take at least 2 1/2 hours to move from the edge of the plaza to the rotunda. So, I turned around. As much as I wanted to share that experience with other Americans, I can’t afford to get sick right now.

This morning, I watched President Carter’s state funeral on CSPAN, while plumbers fixed a busted valve. (While cold showers are often welcome in Washington summer, the dead of winter is a suboptimal time for bracing bathing. 2025 is honestly quite enough.)

All of the living Presidents were at the state funeral: past, present, & future. They were a visual reminder that we are all Americans, first, obligated to put our country and Constitution before party or personal benefit. While we cannot say that all of them have done so, that remains the standard that we should expect from all of them.

In President Biden's eulogy for Carter, he reflected that character is destiny, both in our lives and the life of our nation: Everyone should be treated with dignity, & respect. We have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor and to stand up to the abuse of power.

Biden is right. But the context of President-elect Trump sitting and listening was grim, given the historic abuses of power associated with his record.

Reflecting on President Biden's admission of failure to fight viral lies

President Joe Biden told Susan Page that his biggest disappointment was failing to effectively respond to viral misinformation & Trump’s lies. (Ironically, Biden repeated a false claim, stating “there are no editors out there to say 'That's simply not true.”)

It is a historic failure. I’m bitterly disappointed, too. I expect people to suffer and die because of this failure as official misinformation laundered through the press, bully pulpit, and partisan propaganda networks becomes the norm again.

I notice Biden didn’t apologize to us or reflect on why and now they failed. Instead, he asked Page “how do you deal with that?” It’s a gobsmacking question. As if there hadn’t been years of researchers, scholars, and commissions offering actionable strategies to his administration that they declined to implement?

This is a wicked problem, but smart people have tried to answer it. Former President Obama did his homework and reported out. An Aspen Institute commission delivered a report chock full of recommendations.

I spent four years trying to get this White House to embrace government transparency and accountability as a bulwark against authoritarianism, corruption, and disinformation. I asked them to build back broken trust around participation, collaboration, and open information that finds Americans where we were.

I kept hearing that social media “isn’t real life”, saw officials remain in listening mode, and watched one of the most important policy portfolios at this moment — good governance — relegated to the back burner after the most corrupt administration in our history. The approach they took instead failed.

Public trust in this presidency faltered and never recovered after the White House’s claims about Afghanistan’s corrupt military, rising inflation, the early end of the pandemic, and ultimately the President’s health didn’t hold muster.

The tragedy here is that Biden’s historic lack of public engagement and accessibility was part of the answer, as USA Today highlighted in its coverage of the exclusive interview — apparently the only one the President will sit for as he leaves — and his press office’s demand that many official interviews be “on background,” which in turn set the tone for appointees across agencies.

We needed crisis communications for four years that made sure every American knew what our government was doing, how, and why. Instead, we got business as normal, circa 2008. That push to “normalize”, moving on from Trumpian corruption and lies or from the generational trauma of the pandemic, is part of that story.

The best weapons against lies remains truth and transparency, not censorship. That means officials prebunking rising propaganda with evidence, not reactive spin or silence.

Perhaps the most effective use of truth and transparency came in foreign policy, when the U.S. government showed the world that Russia was building troops ahead of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – but that democratic playbook was never effectively adapted and rolled out at home. USAID Administrator Samantha Power wrote a brilliant Foreign Affairs article about how to defend democracy against autocracy abroad, but her boss was unwilling or unable to do at home.

Again and again, the administration left information voids that merchants of doubt, denial, and division filed with rumors, conspiracies, and lies.

Yesterday, I watched a firestorm of lies and misinformation around the wildfires in Southern California, just like the tsunami of lies and misinformation about the hurricane that swamped the south last fall. I read that the Mayor of Los Angeles had not pushed back on the record to inquiries about false claims of budget cuts for the fire department.

Today, I watched a livestream of President Biden hosting a public conversation with senior officials about the disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles and came away thinking he should have been doing this weekly for years, followed by press conference. (Not the shouted questions he took at the end.)

He shared what I recognize as wisdom from half a century of public life, encouraging federal state, and local officials have to do is explain in simple, straightforward language what capacity we have to response to disaster, how agencies using that capacity, and what capacity they need.

"In crisis, rumors & fear spread quickly," Biden observed. "The most important thing is to be honest be with people. Tell them what’s at stake, what can be done, and how we’re going to get it done."

He's right. It's tragic that his administration didn't apply that playbook more effectively to communications with the American people.

It's 2025. Every elected leader must learn how to do much better rapid response to viral lies that ensures trustworthy information reaches us where we are, or publics will suffer unspeakable harm. Mayor Karen Bass is learning a hard lesson now, compounding unspeakable tragedy. I hope she and her staff can help guide Angelinos through historic trama. Today's press conference was an investment in keeping public trust through public information and public service.

In the year to come, we will see more mayors and governors faced with the unwelcome – but no longer unprecedented job –  of figuring out how to engage and inform constituents who are being actively disinformed with “alternative facts” delivered through personalized propaganda online. Not commenting and being reactive won’t work. I fear this is all going to get much worse before it gets better.

Meta's changes raise risk of genocide by platforming dehumanizing speech

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of significant policy changes at Meta, the largest social networking company in the world.

The consensus in the technology and media world a day after that Zuckerberg surrendered to the right, and I think that's accurate. Trump threatening him with jail and the carrot of delayed antitrust action is part of the story, but so is Zuckerberg's character.

Zuckerberg is defending the changes on Threads, suggesting that people leaving over them are virtue signaling instead of choosing not to participate in his walled gardens because of his policy choices.

"I'm counting on these changes actually making our platforms better. I think Community Notes will be more effective than fact-checkers, reducing the number of people whose accounts get mistakenly banned is good, people want to be able to discuss civic topics and make arguments that are in the mainstream of political discourse, etc. Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better."

I think that's possible, with respect to fact-checking.For decades, I’ve worked as a journalist, open data advocate, and disinformation researcher. I fact-checked, & was in turn fact-checked & peer-reviewed. Being incorrect smarted, but getting it right always came first. Facts remain sacred to me.

Fact-checkers were reasonably incensed that Zuckerberg called them "politically biased" and have "destroyed trust." The trust issue comes from conservatives spreading more misinformation and lies online than other ideological cohorts, which creates a structural conflict with any media outlet or tech platform that drafts a civic integrity or medical misinformation policy and enforces it.

That said, given the spread of lies and propaganda about election fraud, crime rates, vaccines, and climate change, I'm not convinced that what Meta was doing there was working. The skepticism that journalists and researchers reacting to that shift showed on that count is instructive.

As Alexios Mantzarlis, the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network and current director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, told Casey Newton, Zuckerberg had to look past a lot of facts to justify his decisions:

"He chose to ignore research that shows that politically asymmetric interventions against misinformation can result from politically asymmetric sharing of misinformation," Mantzarlis said. "He chose to ignore that a large chunk of the content fact-checkers are flagging is likely not political in nature, but low-quality spammy clickbait that his platforms have commodified. He chose to ignore research that shows Community Notes users are very much motivated by partisan motives and tend to over-target their political opponents."

Despite research that shows Community Notes has failed to mitigate the spread of misinformation and lies on X (in no small part because of Musk boosting it!) I'm cautiously more bullish about Community Notes than the results of fact-checking networks on Meta to date, in part because the latter have been anemic relative to the scale and demand.

That said, I'm not convinced that billions of volunteers Meta platforms, YouTube, and X will be able to crowdsource a more accurate version of the rough draft of history. Employing journalists to contribute and edit Notes would come closer, but that's expensive, complicated, and closely resembles... fact-checking.

The shift Zuckerberg describes around speech are far more problematic, however, leading professor danah boyd to write angry:

This isn’t about free speech. It’s about allowing some people to harm others through vitriol – and providing the tools of amplification to help them.

Of course, there’s power in pretending like this is about free speech. Or good business. Or wise politics. Even to oneself. And I have to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg and those who are surrounding him have countless self-justifications for their actions. But I still cannot imagine sitting in a room writing a script for explicitly justifying hate speech and harassment directed at a specific population with religion as the explicit excuse. Who was in that room? How were they justifying the text they were creating and publishing? Did anyone recognize the echos of history here?

Just so.

As Ina Fried reported, “under Meta's newly relaxed moderation policies, women can be compared to household objects, ethnic groups can be called "filth," users can call for the exclusion of gay people from certain professions and people can refer to a transgender or non-binary person as an "it."”

Fried is excellent on covering transgender issues, as usual. I have three critiques of Axios coverage .

First, this isn’t simply hate speech or hateful conduct: it’s dehumanizing speech.

Scholars of genocide will tell you that referring to people as vermin, scum, animals, or cockroaches primes publics for state violence or stripping civil liberties and rights from marginalized populations.

Either Mark Zuckerberg is ignorant, or he’s been counseled and decided the risk of offline harms or a genocide is acceptable. Fried quotes Ellery Biddle on the connection to the genocide, but not dehumanizing speech.

Casey Newton nailed this:

"I can't tell you how much harm comes from non-illegal but harmful content," a longtime former trust and safety employee at the company told me. The classifiers that the company is now switching off meaningfully reduced the spread of hate movements on Meta's platforms, they said. "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."

In 2018, the United Nations found that Facebook and social media had played a key role in accelerating the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. "Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where, for most users, Facebook is the Internet," the UN concluded.

The former employee I spoke with feared that whatever consequences Meta's surrender to the right on speech issues might have in the United States, its effect in the rest of the world could be even more dire. "

I really think this is a precursor for genocide," they said. "We've seen it happen. Real people's lives are actually going to be endangered. I'm just devastated."

Second, Fried cites “real world violence” three times:
-“policy shifts they say could chill online speech and lead to more real-world violence.”
-“experts also expressed worry that the types of speech now being permitted will fuel real-world violence”
-“Meta also cut a line from its policy that had acknowledged a tie between what happens online and real-world violence.”

This is a framing error. It should be offline violence. What we do and say online is part of real life: that’s why Meta's policy shifts on speech, features, staff, and fact-checking matter.

Finally, Fried quotes Biddle stating that Meta’s policy changes, “taken as a whole, amount to ‘giving a free pass for cherry-picked issues that align perfectly with culture-war hot topics for the right.’”

As I've written before, “culture war” is a euphemism that masks conflicts in a multiracial, pluralistic democracy over extending equal rights, equal justice, & civil liberties to every person — regardless of our race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

We cannot ignore violations of human rights and civil liberties because of the identify of the persons affected. Journalists should make it clear whenever possible religious extremists are seeking to strip human rights from people because of their religious beliefs, not simply “culture.”

Meta may have bent the knee this week, seeking favor with Trump, but the truth still matters. As Nobel laureate Maria Ressa says, now we #HoldTheLine.

DOGE should read CBO & GAO, not X

In a podcast interview, Elon Musk admitted what budget experts said all along: there’s no $2 trillion to be found in a budget with only $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. 

Every year, the Congressional Budget Office publishes policy options for all Americans to read — including naturalized immigrants whose endless self-regard & antipathy to journalists causes them to reject expertise. At the top of the list for discretionary spending? The Pentagon.

I believe that a commission auditing the Department of Defense could find efficiencies, though not at that scale, but of course Musk has a profound conflict of interest as a defense contractor! Increasing taxes on corporations & billionaires would also close the deficit, as would investing in the IRS. But that would not be popular with the corporations and billionaires that have Trump’s ear.

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