No Fact Checking and More Hate Speech: Meta Goes MAGA

Since Donald Trump After winning the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries engaged in an inappropriate groveling fest, making… Pilgrimage trips to Mar-a-Lago,dredging Millions of dollars in contributions To his editorial fund, and interference in the editorial departments of the magazine Publications they own In an apparent attempt to gain the support of the new leader. Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, said: “Hold my beer.”

In a five-minute video on Instagram, he showed off his new curly hairstyle and Global Force watch worth $900,000Zuckerberg announced a series of sweeping policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His reasoning echoed talking points that right-wing lawmakers, pundits, and Trump himself have been making for years. Zuckerberg wasn’t shy about the timing, explicitly saying that the new political order was a factor in his thinking: “The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point toward once again prioritizing expression of opinion,” he said in the video.

According to Zuckerberg’s account, the main motivation for the change was the desire to promote “freedom of expression.” He said Meta social networks had become too extreme in restricting users’ speech, so the thrust of the changes — which included ending Meta’s multi-year partnerships with outside fact-checking organizations and rolling back efforts to limit the spread of hate speech — was to let freedom ring, even if It means “we’ll catch fewer bad things.”

But the word is in Zuckerberg’s captions. He described his company’s (entirely unsuccessful) efforts to avoid promoting toxic content as “censorship.” He has now embraced the same bad-faith characterizations of his employees’ work as the political right, which has used them as a cudgel to force Facebook to allow ultra-conservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and intentional misinformation. In fact, Meta has every right to censor its content any way it wants – “censorship” is something governments do, and private companies simply exercise their rights to free speech by determining what content is appropriate for their users and advertisers.

Zuckerberg first indicated that he might be OK with the term in a Smiley letter Last August, he wrote to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some content related to the COVID-19 pandemic. (The content remains, which in effect shows that Facebook was given the power to shape freedom of expression in the United States, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term, using it as a synonym for the entire practice. To moderate the content itself. “We will significantly reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he promised. An alternative reading might be that we let the Doberman out!

In the same letter to Jordan, the left-leaning former CEO pledged that he would no longer side with either political party. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another, or even appear to be playing a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump has been elected, all of that is out the window. “It seems we are in a new era now,” he said in yesterday’s video. Apparently, it is an era in which private companies are changing their rules to ensure that they are in sync with the ruling party. Last week alone, Zuckerberg replaced Nick Clegg, the company’s former head of global affairs, with a new president. Joel Kaplana former Republican Party operative and clerk for the late Justice Anthony Scalia Prod once Facebook ignores misinformation during 2016 election and also appoints Zuckerberg as president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana Whitean ardent Trump supporter, was appointed to sit on Meta’s board of directors.

Another indication that there is a MAGA element to these changes is Zuckerberg’s announcement that he is moving Meta’s trust, safety, and content moderation teams from California to Texas. Again, he said out loud that the reasons for the geographic move were political: “I think it will help us build the confidence to do this work in places where there is less concern about our teams being biased.” Hello Mark? This step simply installs the Meta content arbitrators in a location where they are likely to be located various prejudice. It’s also clear that Zuckerberg himself might consider California, Trump’s kryptonite, a less tasteful place to work than dark-red Texas.