From Donald Trump regained the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries has been engaging in an unseemly humiliation fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lagoshovel millionaire contributions to its inaugural fund, and interfere in the editorial departments of the publications that have in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the new leader. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “Hold my beer.”
In a five-minute Instagram video, showing off her new curly hairstyle and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watchZuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His reasoning parroted talking points that right-wing lawmakers, pundits and Trump himself have been harping on for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t shy about the moment, explicitly saying that the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point toward once again prioritizing speech,” he said in the video. .
According to Zuckerberg, the main impetus for change is the desire to promote “free expression.” Meta’s social networks had become too extreme in restricting users’ speech, he said, so the thrust of the changes (which included ending Meta’s multi-year partnerships with fact-checking organizations from third parties and withdrawing from efforts to slow the spread of hate speech) is letting freedom ring, even if that means “let’s catch less bad stuff.”
But the key is in Zuckerberg’s nomenclature. He described his company’s (not entirely successful) efforts to prevent the promotion of toxic content as “censorship.” Now it has adopted the same bad-faith characterizations of its employees’ work as did the political right, which used it as a cudgel to force Facebook to allow ultraconservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and intentional misinformation. In reality, Meta has every right to control your content any way it wants; “Censorship” is something governments do, and private companies are simply exercising their own free speech rights by deciding what content is appropriate for their users and advertisers.
Zuckerberg indicated for the first time that he might agree to the term in a smiling letter wrote last August to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying that the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The content remained, which actually illustrates that Facebook is given the power to shape free expression in the US, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term, using it synonymously with the entire practice. of content moderation itself. “We are going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he promised. An alternative reading could be: we are letting the Dobermans out!
In the same letter to Jordan, the left-leaning former CEO promised 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 that has gone down the drain. “It seems like we’re in a new era now,” he said in yesterday’s video. Apparently, it’s an era where private companies change their rules to ensure they are in sync 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 Kaplan, a former Republican operative and clerk to the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once urged Facebook to ignore misinformation during 2016 election. Zuckerberg also chose president of Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana Blancoa fervent Trump supporter, to join 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. Once again, he said out loud that the reasons for the geographic move were political: “I think that will help us build confidence to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Hello Marcos? This move simply anchors Meta content arbiters to a location with a potential different inclination. It’s also a striking statement that Zuckerberg himself might consider California (Trump’s kryptonite) a less attractive place to work than deep red Texas.