Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to his company’s platforms this morning, all of which basically amount to toddling along like a desperate duckling after Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Honestly, I’m disappointed that he can’t even make his terrible platforms worse in an original way, instead choosing to copy Musk’s moves and parrot Trump’s talking points.
Declaring that “the recent elections… feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg detailed that the company will do away with third-party fact checking in favor of community notes, a la Twitter. “The fact-checkers have just become too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US,” he said. (Update 1:40pm--Wired reports that fact-checking organizations didn't know Zuckerberg intended to end their partnerships.)
As part of addressing this supposed bias, Meta will also be moving its trust and safety and content teams from California to Texas, with Zuckerberg saying that “I think [this move] will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Elon Musk has also moved his companies to Texas, citing political reasons.
Meta will also remove restrictions around topics like immigration and gender, with Zuckerberg echoing every right-wing pundit ever in saying, “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.” In a corporate blog, Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan was a bit more obvious about who Meta is following here, writing (emphasis mine),
We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.
In line with this, Zuckerberg also said the platforms will bring back political content, saying, “It feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re getting feedback that people want to see [political] content again,” which he says Meta will phase back in “while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.” This might ring your memory bells; Musk has also claimed changes are coming to Twitter to highlight more of whatever it is he considers positive given his inability to feel human joy.
In closing, Zuckerberg went on about global governments censoring free speech and “making it hard to build anything innovative,” noting that “it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship… But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”
Zuckerberg, like other tech industry heads, has donated to Trump’s inauguration fund. Hearing his mentions of “cultural tipping point[s],” bias and censorship, foreign government interference, and being in “a new era” after “the past four years,” it feels obvious whose narrative he, and by extension his platforms, wants to take up. His recent appointment of UFC CEO Dana White to Meta’s board certainly drives that home.
None of this is new or surprising from him, but it’s so uncreatively depressing. At least Meta’s recent debacles over AI felt like uniquely Meta fuckups, leveraging Zuckerberg’s careless obsession with the latest tech fads and the user-driven nature of his platforms to bring his own twist to the degradation of the internet. This is just so nakedly the party line, so obviously an attempt to curry favor, that I almost feel bad for him as I watch him swim in his oversized tshirt in front of Silicon Valley’s characterless impression of wood, reciting whatever bullshit he thinks will make the big boys like him. It’s going to be such a stupid next four years.
