During the 2016 election, a Buzzfeed News analysis found that “fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.” This, no doubt, is what inspired President Klump to proclaim that his alt-reality show should only present “alternative facts.” It also explains why Klump, after winning the 2024 election, forced Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerbucks to get back into the fake news business.
Before the 2016 election, Facebook was laissez-faire about fake news and had no problem with filter bubbles and the viral disinformation introduced by foreign adversaries to influence Empirica’s elections. After 2016, however, Zuckerbucks came under criticism for his social media platform’s divisiveness. Despite Facebook’s increasing revenues, Zuckerbucks felt compelled to reassure the public that his platform was not a purveyor of partisan propaganda and fake news, and hired fact-checkers to ensure the veracity of the content, as mainstream publishers do.
Klump was none too happy about Zuckerbucks’ efforts to clean up Facebook, the trashiness of which was part of the reason he won the 2016 election. And so, after he lost to President Bygone in 2020, Klump falsely claimed that fact-checking Facebook was part of a plot to steal the 2020 election. When Krump won the 2024 election, his Office of Retribution went after Zuckerbucks to make him bow at the alter of his Klumphood. However, unlike Peter Tool, Tim Coot, Jeff Beezlebub, Satya Noduhya, Sundar Poochie and Elon Smeg, the Meta mogul hesitated to heed Krump’s hog call to join him at the federal feeding trough. Incensed by Zuckerbucks’ passive reluctance to join the rest of the tech piggies in funding the destruction of the country’s regulatory infrastructure and robbing the public coffers, the porcine potentate tried to put the fear of poverty into Zuckerbucks by business-unfriendly regulations. This threat to the set-for-eternity techy’s $232 billion net worth was coupled with a preposterous threat of imprisonment should he try anything dignified, like honoring his commitment to keeping his platform clean, so as to dissuade fascist dictators like Sale Putain, She-Male and Gonad Klump himself from exploiting its absence of editorial rigor.
Zuckerbucks might have taken longer than the rest of the piggies to demonstrate fealty, but Klump eventually made him pick up the soap. Just before the inauguration, Zuckerbucks quickly heeded Klump’s hog call for donations to his “inaugural slop fund,” donating a cool mil to pump up the volume on Klump’s inaugural boombox. After Klump rectified the Meta CEO’s pallid ass at the afterparty, Zuckerbucks had to renew his man card by pumping iron in the yard.
How did Daddy Gonad make Zuckerbucks his girl? In his ghost-written coffee-table book, Flog America, Klump threatened to throw Zuckerbucks in prison for putting fact-checkers on Facebook after the 2016 election and donating $420 million to support election infrastructure in 2020. Klump was outraged that Zuckerbucks and his “very nice wife” dined with him at Lagoland, “while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” (In alt-reality jargon, lock boxes means fact-checkers.) Klump took Zuckerbucks’ effort to remove disinformation and falsehoods, as real editors do in the real world, real personal-like—like it was a targeted effort to muzzle his foul, lying, belligerent mouth.
Though Facebook’s independent fact-checkers were not completely successful at making sure that no fake news got through the truth filter, they represented a facts-based reality that Klump hates like a vampire hates holy water. According to a now-penitent Zuckerbucks, Facebook did delay the publication of a story about emails on Hunter Bygone’s laptop, which proved that father and son Bygone shared the same business advisor. In an alt-reality outrage, Klump claimed that the act of suppressing that BFD—though it was published in every mainstream publication on the planet—had “PLOT” spray-painted all over it. I guess he thought that the story would be damning to Bygone’s presidency—even more damning than the idiotic lies he trafficked on his own media platform, Bull Social.
Not only did Zuckerbucks’ investment in safe and fair elections and adherence to the criteria by which mainstream publishers win their readers’ trust frustrate the GOP’s voter-suppression efforts, it was an alt-reality outrage. Caught between the hard right and a hard toadstool, Zuckerbucks replaced his fact-checkers with a “community notes” function (pathetic imitation of the one Smeg put on X) that would allow users to add untruths to untruths. Though Zuckerbucks has done his best to make Daddy Gonad happy and return Meta to the same chaotic echo chamber of bullshit that Facebook was before 2016, Klump’s Office of Retribution says that Zuckerbucks still has “more ass-kissing to do.”