From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, January 8th.

One of the ways we're covering the second Trump administration era is to center the question,

is this what democracy looks like?

And questions of democracy versus authoritarianism or oligarchy or other anti-democratic trends

aren't just about the government, but also what happens in the private sector.

So today we ask, is this what democracy looks like with respect to the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg

yesterday that Facebook, Instagram, and anything else produced by his company meta, will scale

back fact-checking that's been used to remove dangerous disinformation and expressions of hate.

It's the kind of change that President-elect Trump has wanted,

and Trump praised it after Zuckerberg's announcement. For a little historical context, though,

Facebook took a lot of criticism after the 2016 election for allowing so much Russian and other

election disinformation to spread the way it did.

He appeared before Congress in 2018 and apologized.

But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.

And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech,

as well as developers and data

privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.

And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry. Mark Zuckerberg in 2018, quite the opposite of what he said

yesterday. So did Facebook overcorrect after 2018,

or is Zuckerberg just toying up to the president-elect for financial gain or to avoid persecution?

So before we discuss this with two guests and invite your calls and texts. I'm going to play the full five-minute

video that Zuckerberg posted yesterday morning so you can hear it for yourself and start to come

...