The Morning: Wildfires in Los Angeles

Plus, the end of fact-checking at Meta.

View in browser|nytimes.com January 8, 2025 Good morning. Today, we're covering breaking news about the wildfires spreading uncontained across parts of Southern California. Then, my colleague Steven Lee Myers explains a change in our social media feeds. —David Leonhardt. A burning home in Pacific Palisades. Philip Cheung for The New York Times An inferno By the staff of The Morning Wildfires are raging out of control across parts of Los Angeles. A fierce windstorm is fanning embers, billowing dangerous smoke across the city and turning the sky an apocalyptic red. At least four blazes are spreading in Southern California, near the scenic coast, in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, as well as further inland. Firefighters are struggling to work in the wind, and the fires are uncontained. At least 30,000 people have fled. Some abandoned their cars and escaped on foot to avoid roads jammed with traffic. Residents of one nursing home evacuated on gurneys, officials said. Homes, landmarks and places of worship have been destroyed, and officials warned more destruction is coming. Follow the latest news here. See photos and maps of the fires. Jason Henry for The New York Times Truth social By Steven Lee Myers I cover misinformation and disinformation. Policing the truth on social media is a Sisyphean challenge. The volume of content — billions of posts in hundreds of languages — makes it impossible for the platforms to identify all the errors or lies that people post, let alone to remove them. Yesterday, Meta — the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads — effectively stopped trying. The company said independent fact-checkers would no longer police content on its sites. The announcement punctuated an industrywide retreat in the fight against falsehoods that poison public discourse online. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said the new policy would mean fewer instances when the platforms "accidentally" take down posts wrongly flagged as false. The trade-off, he acknowledged, is that more "bad stuff" will pollute the content we scroll through. That's not just an annoyance when you open Facebook on your phone. It also corrodes our civic life. Social media apps — where the average American spends more than two hours per day — are making it so that truth, especially in politics, is simply a matter of toxic and inconclusive debate online. Meta's conundrum It easy to see why Meta made the change. With Donald Trump about to begin his second term, Zuckerberg seems to have decided that alienating half the country is bad business. Only four years ago, Facebook suspended Trump's account after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, though Zuckerberg had misgivings at the time about deplatforming a sitting president. Since then, Republicans in Congress and in the courts have cast decisions by social media platforms to remove posts as an extension of government censorship. Officials in Washington had urged the companies to remove some posts about election fraud and Covid vaccines. The Supreme Court took up a case about Facebook's removals last year but dismissed it on technical grounds. Mark Zuckerberg Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times Even so, the debate has clearly worried Zuckerberg. In August he wrote a mea culpa to the Republican congressman spearheading the charge against the platforms. He said Meta should have spoken out against what he called "government pressure" to remove some content. Yesterday, the company went further to court the G.O.P. Meta's new policy chief, a former Republican operative, told Fox News that there was "too much political bias" in the fact-checking program. Zuckerberg even plans to move the trust and safety teams — those responsible for policing all kinds of content — from California to Texas to "remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." The company appointed Dana White, a close Trump ally, to its board. The new town square Meta is not entirely abdicating responsibility for what appears on its platforms. It will still take down posts with illegal activity, hate speech and pornography, for example. But like other platforms, it is leaving the political space in order to maintain market share. Elon Musk purchased Twitter (which is now called X) with a promise of unfettered free speech. He also invited back users banned for bad behavior. And he replaced content moderation teams with crowdsourced "community notes" below disputed content. YouTube made a similar change last year. Now Meta is adopting the model, too. Numerous studies have shown the proliferation of hateful, tendentious content on X. Antisemitic, racist and misogynistic posts there rose sharply after Musk's takeover, as did disinformation about climate change. Users spent more time liking and reposting items from authoritarian governments and terrorist groups, including the Islamic State and Hamas. Musk himself regularly peddles conspiratorial ideas about political issues like migration and gender to his 211 million followers. Letting users weigh in on the validity of a post — say, one claiming that vaccines cause autism or that nobody was hurt in the Jan. 6 attack — has promise, researchers say. Today, when enough people speak up on X, a note appears below the contested material. But that process takes time and is susceptible to manipulation. By then, the lie may have gone viral, and the damage is done. Perhaps people still crave something more reliable. That is the promise of upstarts like Bluesky. What happened at X could be a warning. Users and, more important, advertisers have fled. It's also possible that people value entertainment and views they agree with over strict adherence to the truth. If so, the internet may be a place where it is even harder to separate fact from fiction. For more: Zuckerberg, fed up with criticism, has stepped away from his apologetic approach to problems on his platforms. Read about Zuckerberg's political transformation. THE LATEST NEWS Trump's Press Conference Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.  Doug Mills/The New York Times Trump said the U.S. should control Greenland and the Panama Canal. He wants to buy Greenland, and did not rule out using military force in Panama. Trump refused to say whether he would pardon Jan. 6 rioters, and instead used the question to spread a false conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. was responsible for the riot. He said that Hamas must free the hostages it is holding in Gaza. "If they're not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East," he said. Trump also pledged that no new wind turbines would be built during his presidency. The press conference at Mar-a-Lago ran for more than an hour and signaled the return of the chaotic stream-of-consciousness presidency, David Sanger writes. More on Politics At the Capitol Rotunda.  Kent Nishimura for The New York Times Jimmy Carter is lying in state today in the Capitol. The pomp of his memorials is an odd match for a man who never fit in with Washington's elites, Peter Baker writes. In the first elections since Trump's win, Democrats held two legislative seats in Virginia, keeping control of the state legislature, and the Republicans retained a State Senate seat. Forty-eight House Democrats joined Republicans to pass a bill that would deport more migrants charged with nonviolent crimes. Two prisoners whose sentences President Biden reduced last month asked a judge to block their commutations, arguing his decision could jeopardize their appeals. The federal judge who handled Trump's classified documents case barred the special counsel, Jack Smith, from releasing the final report on his investigation, which could contain new evidence of misdeeds. A Republican candidate for North Carolina's Supreme Court challenged the narrow win of an incumbent Democrat, leaving that same court to decide whether to overturn the vote. International Sudanese refugees in Chad. Ivor Prickett for The New York Times The U.S. accused a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies of committing genocide. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France's modern far right, died at 96. He built a half-century career on rants of barely disguised racism and antisemitism. After an earthquake in Tibet, rescuers worked in subzero conditions to find survivors. At least 126 people have died. Other Big Stories Schools are preparing teachers and parents for what to do if immigration agents show up to carry out deportations. The Washington Post, after large financial losses in recent years, is laying off about 4 percent of its work force. The man charged with burning a woman to death on the New York subway told investigators that he did not remember the incident because he was drunk at the time. Opinions Three Times Opinion columnists discuss the biggest risks and challenges facing America. Enough with the land acknowledgments: Performative sensitivity for Native peoples does little good, Kathleen DuVal writes. Here are columns by Bret Stephens on Biden's legacy of deception and Thomas Edsall on civil society's Trump-related failures. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS On Lake Gatún in Panama. Charlie Cordero for The New York Times Intruders: The Panama Canal got wider to accommodate larger ships. Then the saltwater fish invaded. Letter of Recommendation: Sign language can help us all communicate better. Have 5 minutes to spare? Listen here to fall in love with jazz guitar. Lives Lived: Pippa Garner was an art provocateur whose modified consumer goods — like a midriff-baring men's "Half Suit" and a '59 Chevy with its chassis reversed — offered witty commentary on gender, bodies and the boundaries of fine art. She died at 82. SPORTS N.B.A.: The league's two best teams, Cleveland and Oklahoma City, play each other tonight in a possible finals preview. At 31-4, Cleveland are winning at a record pace. N.F.L.: Las Vegas fired its coach Antonio Pierce after just one full season. Possible candidates for his replacement include the former Raiders coach Jon Gruden. College basketball: No. 1 Tennessee, previously the last unbeaten men's team, suffered a 73-43 rout against No. 6 Florida. ARTS AND IDEAS This slice is in Minneapolis. Drew Anthony Smith for The New York Times You can get New York-style pizza in Rexburg, Idaho, that's so good you'd swear you were in Greenwich Village. It's a sign that the New York slice has become an object of food-nerd fascination far beyond the city. More on culture Peter Yarrow, of the 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, died at 86. The singer Thandiswa Mazwai is the voice of South Africa's first post-apartheid generation. "My calling is to sing the people's joy, to sing the people's sadness," she told The Times. "It's going to be a long four years," Stephen Colbert said after Trump promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico "the Gulf of America." THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Kerri Brewer for The New York Times Simmer a lemony Greek chicken, spinach and potato stew. Keep pets safe in the cold. Improve your meal prep. Make a cashmere sweater last longer. GAMES Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangram was wedlock. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Correction: Yesterday's newsletter described incorrectly snakes whose bites pose a risk to humans. They are venomous, not poisonous. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for the Morning newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account. To stop receiving The Morning, unsubscribe. 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