No more fact-checking and hate speech: The Meta is going MAGA

Since Donald Trump After winning back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries joined in the extraordinary celebration. Pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lagoshoveling million dollar contributions interference with its founding fund and editorial departments publications they own an obvious attempt to curry favor with the new leader. “Hold my beer,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday.

In a five-minute Instagram video, a new curly hairstyle and a 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 underscores what right-wing lawmakers, pundits and Trump himself have argued for years. And Zuckerberg hasn’t been coy about the timing, making it clear that the new political regime is a factor in his thinking: “The recent 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 is the desire to increase “freedom of expression”. He said Meta’s social networks had gone too far in restricting users’ speech, so the changes included ending Meta’s long-standing partnership with third-party fact-checking organizations and backing away from efforts to reduce the spread of hate speech. It’s about letting freedom ring, even if it means “we’ll catch less bad stuff.”

But the explanation lies 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 malicious characterizations of his employees’ work as the political right, which has used it to force Facebook to allow ultraconservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and deliberate misinformation. In fact, Meta has the right to censor its content any way it wants – “censorship” is something governments do, and private companies are simply exercising their free speech rights by deciding what content is appropriate for their users and advertisers.

Zuckerberg initially indicated that he might agree with the statement in a a distraught letter he wrote to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan last August that he wanted the Biden administration to “censor” some of Meta’s content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The contention remained, which actually suggests that Facebook has been given the power to shape free speech in the US, not in government.) But in an Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term, using it as a synonym for the whole practice. content moderation itself. “We will drastically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” ​​he said. An alternative reading can be – we release dobermans!

In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-leaning executive vowed to no longer take sides with any political party. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or the other, or even pretend to play a role,” he said. Now that Trump has been elected, all that goes out the window. “It feels like we’re in a new era now,” he said in yesterday’s video. Apparently, it’s a time when private companies change their rules to align with the party in power. Just last week, Zuckerberg appointed Nick Clegg, the company’s former president of global affairs, to the new position. Joel Kaplanformer GOP operative and clerk to the late Justice Anthony Scalia he called once Facebook will ignore misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg also named the 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, security and content management teams from California to Texas. He reiterated that the reasons for the geographic move were political: “I think it will help us build confidence to do this work in places where our teams are less concerned about bias.” Hello Mark? This move simply puts the Meta’s content arbiters in a position of potential different bias. It’s also a remarkable statement that Zuckerberg might find his native California — Trump’s kryptonite — a less pleasant place to work than deep red Texas.