No Fact-Checking and More Hate Speech: Meta Goes MAGA

Because Donald Trump On November 5, having regained the presidency, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries staged an obscene humiliation, forcing pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lagoshovel million dollar contributions to its first fund and intervention in the editorial office publications they own in an apparent attempt to win the favor of the new leader. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “Hold my beer.”

In a five-minute Instagram video, he shows off his new curly hairstyle and $900,000 Gruebal Forsey WatchZuckerberg announced a series of sweeping policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. His rationale echoed talking points that right-wing lawmakers, pundits and Trump himself have made for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t shy about the timing, openly stating that the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent election also feels like a cultural inflection point toward re-prioritizing speech,” he said in the video.

According to Zuckerberg, the main impetus for change is the desire to stimulate “freedom of expression.” He said Meta’s social networks had become too radical in restricting user speech, so the point of the changes, which included ending Meta’s long-standing partnership with third-party fact-checking organizations and abandoning efforts to reduce the spread of hate speech, was to allow freedom to be heard, even if it means “we’ll catch less bad stuff.”

But the point is Zuckerberg’s nomenclature. He called “censorship” his company’s (not entirely successful) efforts to prevent the promotion of toxic content. He has now accepted the same bad performance characteristics of his employees as the political right, which used it as a cudgel to force Facebook to allow ultra-conservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and deliberate disinformation. In reality, Meta has every right to control its content the way it wants: “censorship” is what governments do, and private companies are simply exercising their own free speech rights by deciding what content is suitable for their users and advertisers.

Zuckerberg was the first to indicate that he might not be opposed to the term in cutesy letter Last August, he wrote to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The content remained, effectively illustrating that Facebook is given the power to shape free speech in the US, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term forcefully, using it as a synonym for the entire practice. 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 releasing Dobermans!

In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-wing CEO vowed that he would no longer support any political party. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role—or even pretend to play a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump is elected, all of that has disappeared. “It feels like we’re living in a new era now,” he said in yesterday’s video. This appears to be an era where private companies change their rules to ensure they comply with the rules of 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 Kaplanformer GOP staffer and law clerk to the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once called Facebook will ignore misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg also named president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana Whitean ardent Trump supporter, join Meta’s board of directors.

Another sign 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. He reiterated out loud that the reasons for the geographic move were political: “I think it will help us build confidence in doing this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Hello Mark? This step simply locks Meta content arbiters into place with potentially another bias. Also striking is the claim that Zuckerberg himself may consider California—Trump’s kryptonite—a less pleasant place to work than deep red Texas.