Since Donald Trump regained the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries engaged in an unsightly celebration, causing pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lagocontact million dollar contribution into his inaugural fund and intervened in the paper's editorial board publications they own in an apparent attempt to win the new leader's favor. “Hold my beer,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday.
In a five-minute Instagram video, highlighting his new curly hairstyle and a Gruebal Forsey watch worth $900,000Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could unleash a wave of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. His rationale echoed ideas that right-wing lawmakers, pundits and Trump himself have been pondering for years. And Zuckerberg didn't shy away from the timing, making it clear that the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also felt like a cultural tipping point for once again prioritizing speaking,” he said in the video.
According to Zuckerberg's account, the main driver for the change was the desire to promote “free speech.” Meta's social network had become too strict in restricting user speech, he said, hence the pressure for changes—including the end of Meta's multiyear partnerships with organize third-party fact-checkers and retreat from efforts to reduce the spread of hate speech— is to let freedom ring, even if it means “we'll catch less worse”.
But that's within Zuckerberg's nomenclature. He describes his company's (not entirely successful) efforts to avoid promoting harmful content as “censorship.” Now he has adopted the same bad characterizations of his employees' work that the political right did, using it as a whip to force Facebook to allow extremists to promote things such as targeted harassment and intentional misinformation. In fact, Meta has every right to monitor its content however it wants—“censorship” is something the government does, and private companies simply exercise their right to free speech by how to decide what content is right for their users and advertisers.
Zuckerberg first indicated that he might agree with the term in some way. simple letter he wrote last August to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The content remains, actually illustrating that Facebook is empowered to shape free speech in the United States, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg embraced the term hey, using it as a synonym for the entire activity of content moderation itself. “We will significantly reduce the amount of censorship on our platform,” he promised. An alternative reading might be—we're letting the dobermans out!
In the same letter to Jordan, the left-leaning former CEO vowed that he would no longer side with any political party. “My goal is to remain neutral and not play a role one way or the other — or even appear to be playing a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump is elected, it's all gone. “It feels like we are in a new era,” he said in yesterday's video. Clearly, this is an era where private companies change their rules to ensure they align with the ruling party. Just last week, Zuckerberg replaced Nick Clegg, the company's former president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplana former Republican operative and secretary to the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once urged Facebook ignores misinformation in 2016 election Zuckerberg also tapped the Ultimate Fighting Championship president White Danaan ardent Trump supporter, sits on 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. Again, he said bluntly that the reason for the geographic move was political: “I think it will help us build the confidence to do this work in places where there are less concerns about our group's bias.” Hello, Mark? This move simply anchors Meta's content arbiters in a position with potential distinctive bias. It's also a clear statement that Zuckerberg himself may consider California—Trump's kryptonite—a less attractive place to work than deep red Texas.