Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.”
In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking his new curly hairdo and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale parroted talking points that right-wing legislators, pundits, and Trump himself have been hammering for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t coy about the timing, explicitly saying the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he said in the video.
In Zuckerberg’s telling, the main impetus for the change is the desire to boost “free expression.” Meta’s social networks had become too extreme in restricting the speech of users, he said, so the thrust of the changes—which included ending Meta’s multiyear partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations and retreating from efforts to diminish the spread of hate speech—is to let freedom ring, even if it means “we’re gonna catch less bad stuff.”
But the tell is in Zuckerberg’s nomenclature. He described his company’s (not completely successful) efforts to avoid promoting toxic content as “censorship.” He has now adopted the same bad-faith characterizations of his employees’ work that the political right did, which used it as a bludgeon to force Facebook to allow ultraconservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and intentional misinformation. In reality, Meta has every right to police its content in the way that 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 first indicated that he might be OK with the term in a simpering letter he 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 US, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg bear-hugged the term, using it as a synonym for the entire practice of content moderation itself. “We’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he promised. An alternate reading might be—we’re letting the dobermans out!
In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-leaning CEO took a vow 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 to even appear to be playing a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump is elected, that’s all out the window. “It feels 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’re in sync with the party in power. In the last week alone, Zuckerberg replaced the departing Nick Clegg, the company’s former president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, a former GOP operative and clerk to the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once urged Facebook to ignore misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg also tapped Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, an ardent Trump supporter, to sit on Meta’s board.
Another indication that there’s a MAGA element to these changes is Zuckerberg’s announcement that he’s moving Meta’s trust and safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas. Once again, he said out loud that the reasons for the geographical move were political: “I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Hello, Mark? This move simply anchors Meta’s content arbiters in a location with a potentially different bias. It’s also a conspicuous statement that Zuckerberg himself might consider California—Trump’s kryptonite—as a less savory place to work than deep-red Texas.
Ironically, this is all happening at a moment when Meta has arguably succeeded in making improvements to its once-miserable record of taking down hate speech and other legal, but toxic, posts. In 2019, when I spent a day in one of the company’s content moderation offices, the beleaguered moderators working there told me that dealing with gray areas like hate speech was the one thing that AI could never do. But more recently, Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun revealed that generative AI tools had changed the game. “Five years ago, of all the hate speech that Facebook removed from the platform, about 20 to 25 percent was taken down preemptively by AI systems before anybody saw it,” he told me in an interview late in 2023. “Last year, it was 95 percent.”
Now, Meta says it’s throwing that win into the dumpster. It will change the algorithm, and AI will no longer proactively block “lower severity” policy violations like hate speech and, presumably, bullying. (Meta says that it remains committed to vigilantly blocking “high severity” illegal content, like terrorism and child exploitation.) Meta also has made a series of changes to its speech policies permitting certain kinds of comments formerly deemed hateful. One of those hits a right-wing hot button—gender and sexual identity. For example, now it’s OK to allege that gay or transgender people are mentally ill or call them just plain weird on Facebook.
To be fair, elements of what Zuck is proposing do make some sense—but he’s mischaracterizing the past. Granted, its fact-checking experiment hasn’t been entirely successful, but one reason for the failure was Meta’s inability to commit to it fully, in part, because of right-wing criticism. There have been cases where overzealous algorithmic takedowns have stifled useful discussions, as well as plenty of instances where permitted speech was taken down erroneously. But Meta’s silly blocking of conversation starters like “women shouldn’t serve in combat roles” (which has now been reversed) were usually less a result of bad rules or algorithms than insufficient investment in human content moderation, which can make more nuanced distinctions.
Details aside, it’s impossible to ignore the context of this announcement, especially when Zuckerberg himself is so up-front about it. This is a MAGA move. When Biden was in the White House, Zuckerberg wanted nothing to do with politics—now, he says, he will no longer downrank political posts. Furthermore, he says, “we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” Give Zuckerberg credit for transparency: Meta is saying it embraces Trump and conservative values, and now it’s betting Trump will use his power to thwart foreign attempts to regulate its business. Hours after Zuckerberg’s post, Trump himself gave credence to that interpretation: After praising Meta’s moves, he was asked if Zuckerberg was responding to threats Trump has made about Meta. “Probably,” said the president-elect.
Zuckerberg has always put Meta’s business interests first, but he wasn’t always this transactional with content moderation. In the years I followed the company closely, especially during the multiple conversations we had in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, I found him to be thoughtful and genuinely concerned about the impact that his policies had on users and society in general, even if many of his decisions wound up coming down on the side of maximizing profit, engagement, or growth, rather than comity. And while he indeed was concerned about “free expression” during those years—which he made a focus of a carefully orchestrated 2019 speech at Georgetown University that he referenced in his post yesterday—he also took pains to set up a vast bureaucracy of policy teams and content moderators. He now seems to be dismantling those efforts, or at least exiling them to Texas, in favor of crowdsourced “Community Notes,” as currently seen on X.
The new Zuckerberg seems less concerned about the criticism that he knows will come of these moves—and he doesn’t even have to move to Texas to avoid it. There’s a sense of liberation in his short speech announcement, almost as if he was washing his hands of a decade-long content moderation controversy before turning back to his real passions of AI and mixed reality. He’s one person, at least, exulting in the joys of free expression.
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Source : Wired
