That week, Meta announced the discontinuation of its fact-checking program in the United States and a rollback to its content moderation policy regarding “hateful conduct.” These measures will undoubtedly open the floodgates to more hateful, harassing, and inflammatory content on Facebook and Instagram. Immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community are two of the groups most likely to be affected.

Last month, after Donald Trump won the election, Zuckerberg visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and Mehta transferred $1 million to the presidential inaugural fund. When asked for comment on the meth policy change, Trump acknowledged that Zuckerberg said: “probably” Influenced by his threat to jail tech company CEOs.

This is the formation of a mafia state, where open threats are rewarded with lavish gifts and public praise.

Looking back at the history of content moderation, it is easy to conclude that social media companies are tailoring their products to the needs of those with the power to regulate them. This time is no different, but the impact on vulnerable groups will likely be even worse. By changing the meta policy on fact-checking to appease Trump, Zuckerberg is laying the foundations for a frictionless oligarchy. There, those with the most power and influence would no longer have to fight over facts and corrections.

It was during the first Trump administration that technology companies realized that social media was susceptible to domestic and international media manipulation campaigns. Because their products were being used to spread lies, complaints, conspiracies, and hatred to millions of people. Journalists exposed a massive media manipulation campaign carried out by Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s Internet Research Agency. The campaign used Facebook for political purposes during the 2016 US election and Brexit.

Instead of taking responsibility and aggressively removing abusers, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to advisers known in political circles as a cadre of cutthroat fixers. Most of them are Harvard educated and accustomed to political doublespeak. But controlling speech globally became their lifelong challenge.

In November 2016, in response to the growing public criticism of “fake news” on Facebook, Posted by Zuckerberg Facebook contacted “respected fact-checking organizations,” said it was working methodically to avoid becoming the “arbiter of truth,” and posted a lengthy message on its profile about the misinformation. . By December, Adam Mosseri, then the company’s vice president of newsfeed, said: new protocol For publishing the false story, responsibility for content management was transferred to third-party fact checkers who have signed the non-profit media organization Poynter’s International Code of Principles for Fact-Checking. Despite these efforts, Misinformation continued especially thrives among right-leaning audience.

In 2018, the company’s COO, Sheryl SandbergThe former chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury Department before leaving for Google, he supported Facebook’s “Oversight Board,” also known as its “Supreme Court,” which rules on and reviews controversial moderation decisions. did. In early 2021, former British Deputy Prime Minister and Director of Communications Mehta nick cleggwrote the decision to indefinitely expel President Trump after he used the company’s products to facilitate the attack on the Capitol. Zuckerberg said at the time that the “risk of allowing the president to continue using our services” was “simply too great.”

While Meta’s content arbitration system was expensive and unwieldy, on the plus side it forced some transparency into content moderation decisions and ensured that misinformation is a feature rather than a bug in the right-wing media ecosystem. provided conclusive evidence that there is.

Clegg will now be replaced by Meta’s new head of global policy, Joel Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan is a former senior staffer to George W. Bush. brooks brothers riot After Mr. Mehta’s announcement this week, Mr. Kaplan appeared on Fox News and spoke of his enthusiasm for policy change and lavished Mr. Trump with praise. His influence on the new direction of the meta is clear and troubling to him. defender of internet freedomthey don’t want social media platforms to continue to be pawns in a political chess match.

In remarks attributed to Trump himself, Zuckerberg claimed that “fact checkers are too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve built, especially in the United States.” Importantly, academic research on fact-checking reveals the opposite of Zuckerberg’s claims. a Research by researchers at MIT Sloan School of Management Even among right-wing viewers who doubt the effectiveness of fact-checking, exposure to fact-checking has been shown to reduce beliefs in misinformation.

Meta never applied its rules equally to all users. Whistleblower Francis Haugen revealed that Meta maintained a high-profile list of accounts that were repeatedly allowed to violate the platform’s rules. Meta has historically excluded politicians from fact-checking eligibility, and the end of the fact-checking program is primarily a windfall for right-wing users of Meta products who are more likely to share misinformation on Facebook. That’s likely, according to a study conducted by academics in partnership with Meta and published in 2016. science.

A lack of fact-checking will likely lead to the aggressive spread of conspiracy theories and hateful content about meta products, testing advertisers and brand safety.

Instead of trained fact-checkers who are experts at detecting, documenting, and debunking misinformation, Meta employs a “community notes” system similar to Elon Musk’s We plan to set up a gallery of unauthorized users to control speech.

But moderation around X is also not going well. After facing a rapidly declining user base and an advertiser boycott, X was worth 20% of what Musk paid. A clear example of how moderation on the platform reflects Musk’s whims and preferences is when Musk was admonished last week by ardent MAGA supporters regarding issuing H-1B visas for foreign workers. It became clear when it was being done. Musk’s response is to optimize the platform for “unrepentant user seconds” by focusing on more interesting content, while banning and demonetizing many Maga heavyweights. It was.

Musk has previously criticized deplatforming and demonetization as censorship tactics only employed by the left. That argument doesn’t hold up now “Dark Maga” himself Play the algorithm and Zuckerberg will follow suit. Rather than criticize fact-checkers, Mr. Zuckerberg should admit that he is changing the rules to reflect Mr. Trump’s political agenda, and after Mr. Musk paved the way with will adjust the algorithm so that it can build a base on Facebook and Instagram.

“It’s time to get back to the basics of freedom of expression,” Zuckerberg declared. (It’s not a meta origin story. Facebook’s predecessor asked students at Harvard to rate the physical attractiveness of their female classmates, but Zuckerberg tried to commit it to memory at every opportunity.) ) However, freedom of expression refers to the human right to “seek and receive.” According to the United Nations, provide information.” universal declaration of human rights. It does not guarantee an audience or amplification of the speech. Furthermore, it does not provide protection against fact-checking or labeling of online speech. This is a power reserved only for companies that control the flow of content between platforms.

Far from enabling freedom of expression, Mehta’s changes to its “hateful conduct” policy signal a return to Facebook’s more misogynistic roots. In a blog post, Mehta pledged to align his moderate policies with “mainstream discourse,” particularly on gender and immigration, two issues championed by Trump and Musk during the 2024 campaign. It’s okay to refer to it now LGBTQ+ people Blaming immigrants as mentally ill when it comes to meth products.

It is a clear sign of techno-fascism that communication systems are disrupted by changes in political power after every election. The protection of vulnerable groups online continues to depend on the political ambitions of social media platform CEOs or owners.

This is further proof that social media is not about free speech. That was never the case. Instead, content moderation is the core product of social media, with algorithms deciding whether speech is displayed, how loud it is, and whether there is counter-speech. Contrary to Zuckerberg’s claims, it wasn’t the fact checkers who ruined the meta product. It was always insider political operatives, including Clegg, Sandberg, and Kaplan, who turned social media into a new frontier in the culture wars.