Freedom is the right not to lie
A manifesto about climate, justice and misinformation in 2025.
Meta announced that it will copy Elon Musk's model with Twitter/X “community notes”.
One can infer that behind the cynicism is a preemptive move by the company to avoid the new Trump administration's vendetta.
The case is just one more, a didactic one, of the larger dilemma of media and audiences in the right to truthful information.
Meta's business model is one that profits from your (our) attention and thumbs in order to gather more information to sell us things.
It thus creates an ecosystem of perverse incentives for inflammatory, polarizing and divisive content. Mark Zuckerberg knew this as early as 2018 and didn't want to change it.
Disinformation on social platforms was never a flaw in the system, but part of its design.
An inherent element of the business model based on inciting the production and reproduction of content at any cost in order to have our attention.
This includes climate disinformation.
A Global Witness study in 2022 found that despite the platform's commitments to mitigate it, on Facebook you were still getting page recommendations that said the climate crisis is a conspiracy.
The Facebook-driven fact-checking model was always flawed by the conflict of interest between the platform's business model and PR damage control through funding to some media outlets.
It was treated always more like a charity than a job as important as safeguarding the integrity of the information people receive on their cell phones every day.
This can be witnessed by colleagues in Brazil, left more than once to the fate of digital hordes by Meta.
It is not a contradiction that I was oblivious to all the discussions I was part of during all the years I worked as a fact-checker in Paraguay and abroad.
But the media never knew, could, wanted to stop building our house on someone else's land.
Where someone else is the one who gathers the harvest to sell things or feed an AI.
Engulfed by the quest to reach the audience where it already was and the unsustainable millennial techno optimism or in the name of innovation.
This decision does not directly affect Consenso - which does not receive money from Meta and seeks a different business model through subscriptions - but it does affect several media partners in the region on which the integrity of climate information in Latin America depends.
Meta bows its neck to the epochal movement that calls freedom of speech the right to say anything stupid without anyone to contradict you and calls censorship the act of pointing out your stupidity.
But with this decision we not only lose integrity in reporting, but one of the few moderation mechanisms in Meta that had clear rules.
As journalist Ken Kipplenstein rightly points out, Meta will continue to censor and remove content that “glorifies” so-called “dangerous organizations and people” or “violent events” - Meta decides who does or does not fall into the category.
Also “supporting” quoting these “dangerous individuals” - Meta decides whether one quotes for argument or in a sympathetic manner.
And it gets worse.
Meta will continue to remove “publicly available information” that Meta deems “private” - like investigations of people in power? like emails to which I had access and which demonstrate the influence of european climate deniers in Paraguay?
This is not "freedom of speech absolutism".
This is killing one of the few content moderation policies with clear rules in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
It is a pending individual and collective political decision to stop feeding the monster that stalks us in order to have the vital space where important discussions - such as climate change - are not subjugated to urgent ones - whether the media will survive.
Climate is a hyperproblem, one that challenges how we create and reproduce meaning - this is why climate deniers are a symptom, not the disease.
To get a change at this we need to rethink our relationship with information and meaning.
In times where the meaning of the word freedom is bastardized by its worst enemies of yesterday, I remember what Albert Camus once said :
"The freedom we must conquer is the right not to lie".