On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains the connection between Project 2025 and recent changes in social media policies
Carusone: “Zuckerberg was inoculating himself against what was likely going to be an assault. It's the implementation of Project 2025, a small part of it”
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From the January 8, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Angelo, I feel like so many of our conversations are around the non-reality. And Trump has done a good enough job at that to be reelected. Why does Mark Zuckerberg want so desperately to help?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, in a way, he sort of hinted at it in his announcement. And I think one is to avoid consequences -- and we've talked about this with Project 2025. One of the people that wrote the part of Project 2025 around Section 230, which is the thing that prevents tech companies from being sued, it gives them immunity, Brendan Carr, he's Trump's designate to be the FCC chair. And he, right after the election, wrote a letter to these companies basically saying, "We're going to come at you and your 230 protections if you continue to censor." And one of the things that he described as censorship are these fact-checking programs. So in a way, you know, Zuckerberg was inoculating himself against what was likely going to be an assault. It's the implementation of Project 2025, a small part of it.
But then, there's something more insidious than that and that's the thing he hinted at in his announcement, which is he sort of said he's going to work with the Trump administration to push back and sort of get the EU to roll back a bunch of their policies and protections in place. The EU has a much more robust set of regulatory, you know -- regulations around these social media companies: for privacy, for data protection, for information, for their obligations around their algorithm, what they're promoting, what they're not promoting, around hate speech and extremism.
And it's pretty clear just based on that announcement and where the tea leaves are that he's going to be -- that he wants to be at the table. He wants Facebook to be one of the benefits and the recipients of sort of a lax of those regulations. And it's all going to be under the guise of free speech, but really it's about a free-for-all that advantages as you noted the alternative reality that Trump is spinning.
And that's really the part about this, you know. The fact-checking piece of this -- it's the part that's so unsettling -- is if all they did was roll back fact-checking, truth might be able to survive. But he did a lot more as a part of these changes of policies, because in addition to rolling back fact-checking, they're also getting rid of the limitation and the squelching and the slowing down of certain types of political information or a lot of political information. They reduced the reach of that for the last few years.
So they're not only going to allow poison into the system, but Zuckerberg is simultaneously opening up the spigot while this new poison is being injected into there. So some of it is done to avoid consequences, but also he's going to get something out of this, which is deregulation broadly. And then in the short term it's going to greatly benefit the alternative reality that Trump and his allies are trying to build.