Mark Zuckerberg’s end to Meta factchecking is a desperate play for engagement

As factchecking attempts end, Meta's platforms will become a wasteland of fake news and misinformation

Mark Zuckerberg craves one metric more than any other: engagement, the statistic that tracks how long social media users spend scrolling, clicking, commenting, and viewing ads. More engagement, more profit. The Meta CEO will do almost anything to keep users online for an extra two minutes - even, it seems, surrender his websites to a flood of fake news.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that his company plans to fire its US factcheckers and weaken its ability to moderate disinformation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. This new policy is meant to curry favor with the coming Trump administration. It's also a desperate attempt to boost engagement across all Meta's social networks.