No fact checking and no more hate speech: Meta Goes MAGA

Since Donald Trump regained the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries engaged in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-à-Lagoshovel million dollar contributions at its inaugural fund, and introducing it into the editorial departments of the publications you 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, she rocks her new curly hair and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watchZuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. His reasoning echoed the talking points that right-wing lawmakers, pundits, and Trump himself have been hammering home for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t shy about the timing, saying explicitly that the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent election also feels like a cultural tipping point for a shift in prioritizing the discourse “, he said in the video.

In Zuckerberg’s statement, the main impetus for the change is the desire to push “free expression”. Meta’s social networks have become too extreme in limiting user speech, he said, thus prompting the changes, which include ending Meta’s multi-year partnerships with fact-checking organizations. third parties and withdrawing from efforts to reduce the spread of hate speech – is to let freedom ring, even if it means “we have to catch less bad things”.

But the detail 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 bad-faith characterization of his employees’ work that the political right has, using it as a vehicle to force Facebook to allow ultra-conservatives to promote things like blasphemy targeted and intentional misinformation. In reality, Meta has the right to censor its content in any way it wants – “censorship” is something that governments do, and private companies simply exercise their free speech rights by deciding what content is suitable for its users and advertisers.

Zuckerberg first indicated that he might be fine with the term in a simpering 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 granted the power to shape free expression in the United States, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term, using it as a synonym throughout the practice. of the moderation of the content itself. “We will drastically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” ​​he promised. An alternative reading could be – let’s leave the dobermans!

In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-wing CEO vowed to no longer be part of political parties. “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 is elected, that’s all out the window. “It seems like we’re in a new era now,” he said in yesterday’s video. Apparently, it is an era where private companies change their rules to ensure that they are in sync with the party in power. Just last week, Zuckerberg replaced Nick Clegg, the company’s former president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplana former GOP operative and employee of the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once prompted Facebook to ignore misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg also touched the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana Whitean ardent supporter of Trump, to sit on the board of Meta.

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