No Fact Checking and More Hate Speech: Meta Goes MAGA
Since Donald Trump After we won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries engaged in an unseemly shouting match Pilgrimages to Mar-a-LagoShovels Contributions in the millions to his inaugural fund and interference in the editorial departments of the Publications they own in an apparent attempt to win the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “Hold my beer.”
In a five-minute Instagram video, he rocks his new curly hairstyle and a Gruebal Forsey watch valued at $900,000Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the door to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. His reasoning reiterated talking points that right-wing lawmakers, pundits and Trump himself have espoused for years. And Zuckerberg didn’t hold back about the timing, specifically emphasizing that the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural turning point to prioritize speech again,” said him in the video.
According to Zuckerberg, the main reason for the change is the desire to promote “free speech.” Meta’s social networks have become too extreme in restricting users’ expression, he said. So the focus of the changes — which included ending Meta’s multi-year partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations and withdrawing from efforts to curb the spread of hate speech — is to let freedom ring, even if that means, “We’ll catch.” “We can think of something less bad.”
But the tell lies in Zuckerberg’s nomenclature. He described his company’s (not entirely successful) efforts to avoid promoting toxic content as “censorship.” He has now adopted the same malicious characterizations of his employees’ work as the political right, which used it as a cudgel to force Facebook to allow ultra-conservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and deliberate misinformation. In reality, Meta has every right to police its content however it wants – “censorship” is something governments do, and private companies are simply exercising their own right to free speech by deciding what content is available to their users and suitable for advertisers.
Zuckerberg initially hinted that he might be okay with the term simple letter He wrote to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan last August saying the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The content remained, which actually shows that Facebook has the power to shape free speech in the US, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg vehemently embraced the term, calling it synonymous with the The entire practice uses content moderation itself. “We will drastically reduce censorship on our platforms,” he promised. An alternative reading could be: We let the Dobermans out!
In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-wing CEO vowed that he would no longer side with either political party. “My goal is to be neutral and not to play a role one way or another — or even appear to play a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump is elected, that’s all out the window. “It feels like we’re in a new era now,” he said in yesterday’s video. Apparently it’s a time when private companies change their rules to ensure they are in line with the party in power. In the last week alone, Zuckerberg replaced the outgoing Nick Clegg, the company’s former president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplana former GOP operative and clerk to the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once pushed Facebook ignored misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg was also named president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana Whitean ardent Trump supporter, is said to sit on the Meta board.
Another indication that these changes have a MAGA element is Zuckerberg’s announcement that he will be moving Meta’s trust, security and content moderation teams from California to Texas. Once again, he said out loud that the reasons for the geographic move were political: “I think this will help us build trust to do this work in places where there are fewer concerns about bias on our teams.” Hello , Mark? This move simply anchors Meta’s content brokers in a place of potential different Bias. It’s also a striking statement that Zuckerberg himself might consider California – Trump’s kryptonite – a less palatable place to work than deep red Texas.
