No fact-checking and more hate speech: Meta becomes MAGA

Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on Nov. 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries joined in the obscene celebration, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lagoshovel million dollar installments to his introductory fund and intervention in the editorial departments of publications they own 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, rocking her new curly hairstyle and a Gruebal Forsey watch for $900,000Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. His rationale echoed talking points that right-wing lawmakers, pundits and Trump himself have hammered home for years. And Zuckerberg was unconcerned about the timing, making it clear that the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The last election also feels like a cultural tipping point toward prioritizing speech again,” he said in the video.

According to Zuckerberg, the main impetus for the change was a desire to promote “free expression.” Meta’s social networks have become too extreme in restricting user speech, he said, so the force of the changes — which include ending Meta’s long-standing partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations and pulling back from efforts to reduce the spread of hate speech – is to let freedom ring, even if it means “we’ll catch less bad stuff.”

But the narrative is in Zuckerberg’s nomenclature. He described his company’s (not entirely successful) efforts to avoid promoting toxic content as “censorship.” Now he has adopted the same unscrupulous characterizations of his employees’ work that the political right does, using it as a cudgel to force Facebook to allow ultraconservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and deliberate misinformation. In reality, Meta has every right to control its content however it wants – “censorship” is something that 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 first indicated that he might be fine with the term in a a false letter he wrote last August to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying the Biden administration wanted Metta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The content remained, effectively illustrating that Facebook has been given the power to shape free expression in the US, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term bear, using it as a synonym for the entire practice of self-moderation the content. “We will dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” ​​he promised. An alternative reading could be – we release the dobermans!

In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-leaning executive vowed to no longer join any political party. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or the other or even appear to play a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump has been elected, all of that is out the window. “Now we feel like we’re in a new era,” he said in yesterday’s video. Apparently, this is an era where private companies change their rules to ensure they are in sync with the party in power. Just in the past week, Zuckerberg replaced the outgoing Nick Clegg, the company’s former president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplana former Republican Party operator and clerk to the late Justice Anthony Scalia who once prompted Facebook to ignore misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg also elected president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana Whitean ardent Trump supporter, to sit on Meta’s board.

Another indication that there is a MAGA element to these changes is Zuckerberg’s announcement that he is moving Meta’s trust and safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas. Once again, he said aloud that the reasons for the geographic move were political: “I think it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Hi, Mark? This move simply anchors the Meta content arbiters in place with potential different bias. It’s also an obvious statement that Zuckerberg himself might consider California — Trump’s kryptonite — a less palatable place to work than deep red Texas.