One of the billionaires working to kiss the Trump ring is Mark Zuckerberg. He has made changes to Meta moderation to appease the incoming dictator.
When the far right make a massive accusation, it’s a pretty good bet that either the exact opposite is true or it’s a confession (hence “every accusation is a confession”). One of the many longstanding grievances, according to the far right, is that social media is somehow rigged against them. Specifically, that moderation decisions are made to not favour the far right point of view.
In real life, however, moderation decisions, according to research, actually favour the far right. If you are going to be breaking the rules, it’s best to be a right wing extremist while doing so because, chances are, you are going to be afforded more leniency in any decision that is being made. Of course, when people test the boundaries of what they can get away with, and find that they can get away with a whole lot more, those boundaries end up getting pushed even more. So, it’s probably not a surprise that the follow-up research found that far right users get moderated more because they break the rules more.
Obviously, reality is no deterrent for the far right who cling to the myth that they are somehow being oppressed on social media because of their “deeply held conservative beliefs”. For them, if they are going to harass others, threaten people, and defame others, that’s just “deeply held conservative beliefs” and they should get a free pass from moderators as a result of that.
In fact, these “beliefs” were taken to a whole new extreme when some started creating their own platform, calling them platforms that respect “free speech”. This included platforms like Parler and Gab where they can freely express their vitriol without fear of repercussions of their actions. The problem with this is that when you base your political existence on being a complete and total unrepentant prick to others who think differently than you, living your social media life in a right wing echo chamber becomes deeply empty because it breaks the cycle of hate in the process. After all, what good is a platform that has no “libs” when all you want to do is spend your days “owning the libs”? As a result of that, right wing platforms eventually became complete failures.
So, the question for the far right then became, how does one foster hate and rage farming? After all, the whole point is to be abusive to others, so you have to be around your targeted victims. That solution ultimately came in the form of buying out an existing popular platform. Elon Musk, for his part, happily obliged with that by buying Twitter for $44 billion. One of the cover stories was that he wanted to ensure that the platform supports “free speech”. Much like other on the far right, by “free speech”, he means supporting speech he likes while silencing what he doesn’t like.
Naturally, that’s exactly what happened. Speech that he and his close contacts didn’t like got suppressed and neo-nazi’s had their bans removed. This led to waves upon waves of users leaving the platform, advertising ditching the platform after the platform clearly became not brand safe, and bots and scams to take over the platform. Alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky became major recipients of users fleeing the platform, becoming excellent alternatives to the now hate mongering platform. Ultimately, X/Twitter became a shadow of its former self in the grand scheme of things.
While Twitter was gradually getting transformed into one of many failed right wing echo chambers, it seems that there is movement afoot that the same may be more or less happening on Meta platforms – specifically Facebook and Instagram. Already, Facebook has faced considerable controversy over its role in massive foreign interference over the years. The most famous example, of course, being the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Those allegations, of course, have continued in recent months as well. As a result, there have been countless calls over the years for Meta to do more to curb disinformation campaigns and foreign interference.
While progress was being made through the deployment of fact checking and some content filtering, the platform continued to be problematic. One example being the suppression of a post by Planned Parenthood. This while other controversies continued to hit the platform where not enough was being done. The problem now is the election of Donald Trump.
Even before the election of Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta and Facebook, was already pre-emptively surrendering to Trump and clamoring to kiss the ring. From TechDirt at the time:
You may have seen a bunch of headlines in the past couple of days claiming that Mark Zuckerberg “admitted” that the Biden White House pressured him about “censoring” content and he wished he’d stood up to them more. It got plenty of coverage. Unfortunately, almost none of that coverage is accurately reporting what happened, what’s new, and what was actually said.
The reality is pretty straightforward: Mark Zuckerberg folded like a cheap card table, facing coercive pressure from Rep. Jim Jordan to modify Meta’s moderation practices. What he says misleadingly plays into Jordan’s mendaciously misleading campaign. In short, Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.
So, what was the big reason for Zuckerberg to be pre-emptively raising his hands up in surrender all of a sudden? Apparently, convicted felon, Donald Trump, was theatening Zuckerberg with prison if he continued moderating right wing extremists. From TechDirt:
Multiple people saw the news of the letter and claimed that it was an admission by Zuckerberg that he wanted Donald Trump to win. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seemed pretty clear that the entire intent of the letter was to position himself as a suck-up to Trump in case Trump wins.
Now there’s a bit more evidence for that. Politico reported that Donald Trump has a new book coming out next week in which he not only blames Mark Zuckerberg for apparently trying to rig the election against him, but also talks about wanting to put Zuckerberg in jail for the rest of his life if he dares do anything to influence this election.
This is ridiculous (and dangerous) on multiple levels. The claim that he helped rig the election is nonsense, based on Zuck’s charity spending a bunch of money on better election infrastructure. As Zuckerberg said in his spineless letter, that was on a non-partisan basis.
The only way spending on secure election infrastructure is biased towards one party is if the other party was planning to abuse insecure voting infrastructure to steal an election. So one way to read this is a Trump admission that Zuckerberg’s effort to make the election more secure foiled his plans to steal it.
Either way, part of Zuckerberg’s attempt to get back in the good graces of Trump was to claim he wouldn’t do that again merely because some people thought it looked biased in one direction.
One of those “some people” appears to be Trump:
Trump writes that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT,” Trump added, referring to a $420 million contribution Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made during the 2020 election to fund election infrastructure.
So, first off, funding election infrastructure is not plotting against the President. I mean, that’s simply unhinged. But then he claims that if it happened again, he’d put Zuckerberg in jail:
“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” Trump continues. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The problem with basically all of this is that it’s made-up nonsense, pushed by the MAGA faithful to try to make sure that no one ever calls them on their bullshit.
The messaging from the far right is quite clear: do something that Trump and his inner circle doesn’t like and they will throw you in jail and toss the key.
All of that led to Zuckerberg making a large announcement on Facebook saying that changes are going to be happening with moderation policies. The announcement came in the form of a 5 minute video where he professes his support for free speech, is moving content moderation teams from California to Texas, and that he wants to remove fact-checking and replace it with community notes among other things. The video was quite cryptic. Indeed, there have been instances of Meta engaging in censorial activities that were overboard. It’s not in the ways the far right say that it is, but that is, indeed, something that has happened on multiple occasions.
This had led many to fear that moderation on the platform was getting hollowed out and that disinformation would run rampant far more than ever before on the platforms. Indeed, CNN published an article with the headline “Meta is getting rid of fact checkers. Zuckerberg acknowledged more harmful content will appear on the platforms now“. Ultimately, the original video was quite cryptic and it’s definitely possible to infer that there are actual positive changes involved here. After all, TechDirt notes that the video announcement was, indeed, a mixed bag with potential positives and negatives. The EFF, based on earlier reports of these changes, were cautiously optimistic about these changes:
In general, EFF supports moves that bring more freedom of expression and transparency to platforms—regardless of their political motivation. We’re encouraged by Meta’s recognition that automated flagging and responses to flagged content have caused all sorts of mistakes in moderation. Just this week, it was reported that some of those “mistakes” were heavily censoring LGBTQ+ content. We sincerely hope that the lightened restrictions announced by Meta will apply uniformly, and not just to hot-button U.S. political topics.
Censorship, broadly, is not the answer to misinformation. We encourage social media companies to employ a variety of non-censorship tools to address problematic speech on their platforms and fact-checking can be one of those tools. Community notes, essentially crowd-sourced fact-checking, can be a very valuable tool for addressing misinformation and potentially give greater control to users. But fact-checking by professional organizations with ready access to subject-matter expertise can be another. This has proved especially true in international contexts where they have been instrumental in refuting, for example, genocide denial.
So, even if Meta is changing how it uses and preferences fact-checking entities, we hope that Meta will continue to look to fact-checking entities as an available tool. Meta does not have to, and should not, choose one system to the exclusion of the other.
Importantly, misinformation is only one of many content moderation challenges facing Meta and other social media companies. We hope Meta will also look closely at its content moderation practices with regards to other commonly censored topics such as LGBTQ speech, political dissidence, and sex work.
Part of the problem in all of this is this question: when Mark Zuckerberg is talking about being supportive of free speech, does he mean actual free speech or the distorted far right version of free speech? After all, those are two completely different things. One values speech while the other elevates speech they support while suppressing others that they disagree with. That’s a big reason why there was so much mixed reaction to all of this.
Unfortunately, initial signs about these changes were pointing to the latter. Shortly after Zuckerberg made their initial announcement, Trump acknowledged that he made the life in prison threat and was seemingly proud that he managed to make Zuckerberg make these changes. From The New Republic:
Donald Trump couldn’t help but gloat Tuesday that he’d successfully bullied Mark Zuckerberg into making a spate of policy changes at Meta that will allow for the rampant spread of misinformation.
During a press conference, one reporter asked the president-elect whether he thought he had anything to do with Zuckerberg’s decision to supposedly recommit his social media platforms to free speech by demolishing its fact-checking system, as well as certain content filters and restrictions.
“Do you think he’s directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?” the reporter asked.
“Probably,” Trump replied.
“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in his book Save America, which was published in August.
The president-elect had previously called out his buddy “ZUCKERBUCKS” in a July post on Truth Social, promising to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time.”
Yea, that’s… not a good sign. Sure enough, further clarification on where these changes were going and it was to be more friendly to right wing extremism. From MSNBC:
Meta will allow its billions of social media users to accuse people of being mentally ill based on their sexuality or gender identity, among broader changes it made to its moderation policies and practices Tuesday.
The company’s new guidelines prohibit insults about someone’s intellect or mental illness on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, as have previous iterations. However, the latest guidelines now include a caveat for accusing LGBTQ people of being mentally ill because they are gay or transgender.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the revised company guidelines read.
Unsurprisingly, this was a signal for many that Meta is now opening the floodgates to hate among other things. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned the changes:
However, shortly after our initial statement was published, we became aware that rather than addressing those historically over-moderated subjects, Meta was taking the opposite tack and —as reported by the Independent—was making targeted changes to its hateful conduct policy that would allow dehumanizing statements to be made about certain vulnerable groups.
It was our mistake to formulate our responses and expectations on what is essentially a marketing video for upcoming policy changes before any of those changes were reflected in their documentation. We prefer to focus on the actual impacts of online censorship felt by people, which tends to be further removed from the stated policies outlined in community guidelines and terms of service documents. Facebook has a clear and disturbing track record of silencing and further marginalizing already oppressed peoples, and then being less than forthright about their content moderation policy. These first changes to actually surface in Facebook’s community standards document seem to be in the same vein.
These changes reveal that Meta seems less interested in freedom of expression as a principle and more focused on appeasing the incoming U.S. administration, a concern we mentioned in our initial statement with respect to the announced move of the content policy team from California to Texas to address “appearances of bias.” Meta said it would be making some changes to reflect that these topics are “the subject of frequent political discourse and debate” and can be said “on TV or the floor of Congress.” But if that is truly Meta’s new standard, we are struck by how selectively it is being rolled out, and particularly allowing more anti-LGBTQ+ speech.
We continue to stand firmly against hateful anti-trans content remaining on Meta’s platforms, and strongly condemn any policy change directly aimed at enabling hate toward vulnerable communities—both in the U.S. and internationally.
TechDirt was also not happy with the changes:
It seems like quite a choice. We’ve discussed at great length the whole “Nazi bar” concept, and this is very much a Nazi bar moment for Zuckerberg. This is not calling him a Nazi (as some will inevitably, misleadingly, whine). The whole point of the “Nazi bar” idea is that if the owner of a private space makes it clear that Nazis are welcome, then everyone else will come to realize that it’s a Nazi bar. It doesn’t matter whether or not the owners are Nazis themselves. All that matters is the public perception.
And these specific changes are very much Zuckerberg yelling “Nazis welcome!”
A couple of years ago, when Substack more or less made the same decision, my main complaint was that the company wanted to signal that it was the Nazi bar by dog whistling without coming out and admitting it outright. It’s your private property. You can run it as a Nazi bar if you want to, No one’s stopping you from doing it.
But fucking own it.
Don’t give some bullshit line about “free speech” when it’s not true. Just own what you’re doing: “we’re making a space for bigots to feel comfortable, by changing our rules to expressly cater to them, while expressly harming the marginalized groups they hate.”
That would be the honest admission. But just like Substack, Meta won’t do this, because it’s run by cowards.
Indeed, the most incredible thing in all of this is that these changes show how successful the “working the refs” aspect of the MAGA movement has been over the last few years. It was always designed to get social media companies to create special rules for their own hot button topics, and now they’ve got them. They’re literally getting special treatment by having Meta write rules that say “your bigotry, and just your bigotry, is favored here” while at the very same time suppressing speech around LGBTQ or other progressive issues.
It’s not “freedom of speech” that Zuck is bringing here. It’s “we’re taking one side in the culture war.”
In altering their policies to appease extremists, Meta is directly endangering the well-being and safety of LGBTQ users on their platforms.
So, in short, it is no secret that Zuckerberg is clamouring to kiss the Trump ring. He’s been doing it before the election results and now this effort to suck up to the far right has been made official. When he talks a big game about supporting “free speech”, what he really means is supporting the speech of far right extremists while suppressing the speech of others. In fact, Zuckerberg is not only implying it any more, he’s putting it in writing and tacking it up as official Meta policy.
There will, of course, be implications to all of this that go beyond suppressing numerous voices in our society. It does raise the question of whether or not Meta is brand safe or not. After all, do you, as an advertiser, really want to be inadvertently sponsoring a post talking about killing a specific group of members in society? Probably not. Complicating matters from an advertising perspective is the fact that the Trump administration is going to want to discourage advertisers from pulling advertising dollars from not brand safe platforms. Hell, Musk even was bold enough to sue for failure to advertise on his platform. So, there are complicating factors on that front
On a different front, users may very well react in the same way that they reacted to Musk’s changes on X/Twitter. That, specifically, is leaving the platform in droves. It’s happened before and it can happen here as well. Eventually, the hate will become excessive and compel users to leave. What’s more, Zuckerberg may very well implement even more restrictions on certain people’s speech, making it gradually even more compelling to leave for a different platform. Time will tell on how much that would happen, but if it does happen, it would be a case of history repeating itself.
Either way, this is yet another sign that the US is descending into becoming a nation of hate. Trump is going to be pushing hard to spread hate, chaos, and destruction. As many have pointed out already, there won’t be any close advisers who are going to really stop him this time around from following through on his more dangerous tendencies (unlike his first term in office). What’s more, this shows that Trump is not solely focusing his chaos on the international stage (with Trump’s threats to annex Canada and other nations being one example). That chaos is also very much directed inward within the US as well. The frightening thing in all of this is that we are still 11 days away from Trump being inaugurated. God speed to all those trying to survive the US in the next 4 years.
