My Thoughts On Facebook's Removal of Fact Checkers

The blackpilling is keeping people stuck in the past, and it's a view that doesn't hold space for change.

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Since Facebook announced it was going to remove fact checkers, I began seeing articles like: “Why I’m finally quitting Facebook” and “Why Facebook will now be a den of misinformation and hate speech.”

All this while I have been excited over the past two months to be back on Facebook posting content again.

After all, there is nowhere else I can go where I get 30 million monthly views of our content. While this isn’t traffic sent to our website like it used to be, at least our content is seen. (BTW: follow us on FB here if you haven’t.)

Hearing about the removal of Fact Checkers only made my excitement grow further.

Most of the complaints about Facebook’s removal of fact-checking have been coming from mainstream media outlets, left-leaning influencers and journalists, and people who thought fact checking was only doing good - it very clearly wasn’t.

There have also been those who see this new move a scam, a dupe, another move that is actually bad. We’re being tricked! (More on this later)

I’ve also seen takes where some feel Facebook is pandering to Trump and the right-wing given the incoming administration. Some also believe it was RFK Jr’s recent lawsuit that spurred the decision from Zuckerberg.

I don’t agree either of these. From my observation, this move has been in the works for at least a year, and even Zuckerberg was making this clear as of Aug 2024.

I think Zuckerberg is largely doing two things with the removal of fact checkers and the lifting of certain free speech rules:

1. Returning to a better approach for content moderation that he uncovered via the wisdom of making mistakes and seeing how well X is doing with their community moderation approach.

2. Making sure he keeps making money for Meta.

My goal in this piece is to explore the good news here, discuss the issue with a blackpilled perspective, and consider a big question about collective change. I’ll begin with a brief history of our experience with Facebook as it sets an important context.

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They Killed Our Business - But There’s a Bigger Picture

It’s no secret that Facebook completely destroyed our business beginning in 2016 when we operated solely under Collective Evolution.

The long and short of it is, before COVID, the worst period of censorship existed. Thousands of brands experienced a coordinated and largescale destruction of the businesses they built almost overnight. This happened through full account deletion, demonetization, and/or shadowbanning.

What happened was, employees at Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube collaborated to take down the accounts of specific brands on every platform at exactly the same time.

Imagine waking up and opening your phone to see that all at once, your 2M+ Facebook page is gone, 150K+ YouTube channel is gone, and your 60K twitter account is gone. The best part, no one told anyone why it happened, it was just done. If you did get a hold of anyone at these organizations to find out what’s up, they’d just say:

This happened to many of our colleagues.

To us, we were shadowbanned, demonetized from YouTube, and almost entirely removed from Google search. This move immediately cost us at minimum $2.5 million in revenue for that year, and it only grew from there as we were a very fast growing company with a huge audience.

At the time, we tried to tell the world this was happening. We had a viewership of over around 30 million readers a month, yet very few believed this was happening to the scale it was. Most thought it was hyperbole or that we were exaggerating. Some in the mainstream even called us conspiracy theorists for thinking these companies would do this.

But no, it was all real beginning in 2016, and our 30 million monthly visitors were cut to just a couple of million fairly quickly. Millions in yearly revenue cut to a point where we had to get other work to make ends meet.

Mark Zuckerberg recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and stated:

"I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath, I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, OK, there's no way that [Trump] could have gotten elected except for misinformation […] Some of it started with the Russia collusion stuff, but it kind of morphed into different things over time."

This lines up perfectly with what we had been saying since back then. That social media and independent media were growing so influential that elitists were losing control of narrative and how the world functions to an extent.

Zuckerberg’s comments suggest that at the time, elitists were starting to get upset about this power, and the hammer needed to drop. So it did.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson in February 2024, Mike Benz also confirmed what we have been saying about internet censorship this whole time.

“But one thing on what you just mentioned, which is that from their perspective, they just weren't ready for the internet. 2016 was really the first time that social media had reached such maturity that it began to eclipse legacy media. I mean, this was a long time coming. I think folks saw this building from 2006 through 2016.”

2016 was Brexit, the US election, and Wikileaks exposing Hillary Clinton’s corruption. The legacy media could not control the narratives on these topics. We covered all of them.

Benz reveals it was these events in 2016 that brought on a huge effort to begin government initiated censorship and narrative control via social media platforms and places like YouTube and Google.

That said, it took a long time for collective culture to figure out this was happening. It was only during COVID that people started to understand the scale of censorship.

The COVID Era

During the COVID era, yeah, censorship was bad. It resulted in some banned accounts and a deeply controlled narrative that pretended very complex and emerging topics were black and white. This ‘simple narrative’ gave governments and corporations a great deal of power and profit potential throughout the era.

But the censorship didn’t work so well in the end.

Many influencers who were shouting censorship during COVID were also getting millions of views and tens of thousands of paying supporters at the same time. Think of people like Jay Bhattacharya, Russell Brand, and Robert Malone, I hardly see them missing an audience or opportunity for being censored.

This is largely because people were listening when they yelled censorship. This isn’t quite the same thing as being cast off into the abyss as if you never existed in the first place. That was what us early outlets experienced over the last 7 years or so.

And while it hurt and cost us dearly, our story is part of something larger. Much of the work we and our fellow colleagues did in those early days primed hundreds of millions of hearts and minds for the next layers of awakening that have been occurring over the last 5 years or so.

I don’t hold that as a platitude to help pull me out of the grief of losing what I lost, it’s something I truly believe.

The Way Forward & The Blackpilled Reactions

All that said, seeing Facebook make their end of fact checking announcement was a welcome reality for me. I think it was largely due to Zuckerberg realizing what side of history he was part of and wanting to distance himself from that reality - maybe even realizing how bad of an idea it was. I also think he’s staying true to his most important goal, saving face to make money for Meta.

But that doesn’t really matter right now, what happened is a good thing. Why turn something good into something to complain endlessly about? Why stay endlessly upset over things unconscious people are doing? No one is saying avoid your emotions, but staying stuck, that’s poison.

I don’t consider myself religious but a Bible quote I’m familiar with is useful here as well:

“Forgive them for they know not what they do.” - a revolutionary figure named Jesus. (Maybe he actually said that or maybe he didn’t, but there’s wisdom there.)

To me, this simply means, you don’t have to like the behavior of someone, but to poison yourself with a grudge constantly is not healthy. Talk about it, raise awareness about if you like, but don’t let it turn you persistently sour.

When humans are unconscious, we are literally out of touch with what we’re doing. We don’t see the impact or harm we are causing to the greater aspects of society. And if we do see the impact or harm and do it anyway, it’s because we are unconscious of who we truly are and have become disconnected from humanity/nature in a profound way. This is illness.

Why should I sit here in endless anger as a result of what unconsciousness has done in the past? As said, that would just be poison in my own body, poison in the field.

Knowing what we can control and can’t, and moving forward is wiser and catalytic.

But there is another interesting bit to this. If he and other elitist figures are unconscious beings, it also means they can wake up. This poses an interesting question: how would we know if they did or are starting to?

This is where we have to be careful not to get stuck in the blackpilled worldview. Being blackpilled is essentially being stuck in a state nihilism.

“The elitists always have all the power. Anything good is actually just bad. There is no good in the world. Nothing can change. We’re always being duped!”

Thinking that “this move is just another ploy, they are about to screw us in another way” and worrying 24/7 about what’s coming next is hopelessness. It’s nihilism. It’s stuckness. No change comes from this. It’s a learned behavior. We train our minds with our own thoughts to end up this way.

My nervous system training has taught me this type of thought often emerges from high-tone dorsal vagal energy. It’s extreme survival mode. Conservation energy. It’s the place we go at a last ditch effort to survive. Nothing about this state can help us thrive if we stay in it for long. It is meant to keep us alive when we are bleeding out, not when we are looking to be change agents.

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Think of it this way: if we assume things can change, then we have to assume it has to start at some point. Perhaps you feel it has already started - I would agree with this.

But if you don’t believe it has started, how would you recognize it has started? What would you have to see?

The trouble with being blackpilled is that it’s automatic. It’s default. It’s a program. Something happens that appears good and the programmed response of “nope, can’t be, we’re being duped” kicks in and like clockwork, it invents a plausible explanation about why we’re being duped. There’s little critical thinking here, just automation.

Sometimes we can be correct in seeing a possible future and where things are headed, but how do you know the difference between when it’s an automatic program and when you are correct?

That is the question here.

For me, I see elitist plans foiling everywhere I look. I feel that way partly because I’ve been doing this for 15 years and have witnessed a lot of things change over that time. I also focus a lot on inner work which allows me to stay grounded, centered and objective.

Look at the loss of control mainstream media has. Look at how many people are pushing back on major narratives and not buying into the mainstream conjecture - it’s falling apart. This is clear. And what’s largely driving this is the work the masses are doing to continually open their minds and hearts to something else.

COVID represented a moment where elitist power could see their censorship tactics weren’t working anymore. The tides are turning. Things are changing. When we were censored in 2016 we got sent into the abyss, yet when censorship happened during the CVOID era, those influencers actually grew along with the perspectives about vaccines, Ivermectin and COVID origins, did the censorship work that well? Heck no.

When the ship starts sinking, people start jumping ship. We may not know the new agenda of the jumpers, but are things moving in a better direction? I think so. We haven’t had issues saying anything we want to say on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube since late 2022. That’s good.

To me, if we stay truly in our hearts, in our well being, steering clear of our survival physiology, which can so easily cloud our perspective, we embrace embodied sensemaking.

And in that space, we can more objectively and neutrally sense what’s happening. Our brain will not filter in only what the survival bits want to see, nor only the “positive” bits through rose colored glasses, it will take in all of it. We will see the good, and the bad, and can better impact where things are headed as a change agent within society.

There is flow in that. Peace in that. And empowerment in that. No, we don’t have our hands on the levers of control, but we impact the field with our thoughts and energy. We impact conversation, and we shift awareness.

How useful is endless fighting and whining online?

While I see things moving in a positive direction in many ways, it’s not to say there aren’t still tough things happening. We still have to be open and keep check on power, but I can’t deny the good parts.

Lifting censorship gives the opportunity for the masses to grow. To decide for ourselves. Develop our sensemaking skills as a collective. Sure this won’t happen automatically, that spirit has to be embraced. So embrace it. That is growth. That is evolution.

The Big Questions

What is so uncomfortable about being open to the possibility that this is good? How will we truly discern when things are getting better?

If consciousness is shifting, which I believe it is, wouldn’t this affect people in positions of power too? How would we know if it is or not?