Since Donald Trump won the presidency again on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries has participated in a chaotic grovel-fest, making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling millions of dollars in contributions to the inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial department of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain favor with the new leader. Yesterday, the founder and CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold the beer.” In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking a new curly hairstyle and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates. misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale echoes points that right-wing legislators, pundits, and Trump himself have been making for years. And Zuckerberg was not coy about the timing, emphatically saying that the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The new election is also like a cultural point to prioritize speech again,” he said in the video. According to Zuckerberg, the main impetus for change is the desire to promote “free expression”. Social network Meta has gone too extreme in restricting users’ speech, he said, so the changes include ending Meta’s years-long partnership with third-party fact-checking organizations and backing away from efforts to curtail the spread of hate speech—letting freedom ring, even if that means ” we’ll catch something less bad.” But the saying is in Zuckerberg’s nomenclature. He described the company’s (unsuccessful) efforts to avoid promoting toxic content as “censorship.” They have now applied the same bad faith characterization to the work done by the political right, which they use as a bludgeon to force Facebook to be ultraconservative in order to promote things like targeted harassment and deliberate misinformation. In fact, Meta has the right to monitor its content in any way it wants – “censorship” is what the government does, and private companies only exercise their own free speech rights by deciding what content is appropriate for users and advertisers. Zuckerberg first indicated that he might uncomfortable with the term in a simpering letter written last August to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying the Biden administration wants Meta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The content remains, which actually reflects that Facebook is empowered to shape free expression in the US, not the government.) But in an Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term, using it as a synonym for the entire practice. from content moderation itself. “We will dramatically reduce the number of sensors on our platform,” he promised. An alternative reading is possible-we let the dobermans out! In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-leaning CEO vowed that he would no longer side with one of the political parties. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role—or even appear to play a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump is elected, that all goes out the window. “It feels like we’re in a new era,” he said in a video yesterday. Apparently, these are the times when private companies change the rules to ensure they align with the party in power. Just last week, Zuckerberg replaced Nick Clegg, the company’s former president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, a former GOP operative and clerk for the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once urged Facebook to avoid disinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg also tapped the president Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana White, an ardent Trump supporter, to sit on Meta’s board. Another indication that there is a MAGA element to the change is Zuckerberg’s announcement that he is moving his Meta trust and safety and content moderation team from California to Texas. Once again, he said loudly that the reason for the geographical move was political: “I think it will help us build confidence to do this work in a place where there is less concern about the bias of our team.” Hello Mark? This move only anchors the Meta content arbiter in a location with a different bias. It’s also a clear statement that Zuckerberg himself probably views California—Trump’s kryptonite—as a less savory place to work than deep red Texas.
