American democracy ends in five minutes. We’ll be weeping not only for the end of Science-guided rule but also because of Climate Change since it was forecast to be the coldest Inauguration Day in 40 years.
Let’s try to push through our shared tears to think about Mark Zuckerberg and his foxhole conversion to free speech. From University of Colorado:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company would fire its fact-checkers and instead rely on its users, with the help of AI, to police Facebook and Instagram for false or misleading posts. The company will also move its content moderation team from California to Texas, lift restrictions designed to protect immigrants and LGBTQ people from hate speech and “dial back” penalties for rule-breakers.
Nathan Schneider, assistant professor of media studies, sees it as a wake-up call to users that it may be time to take back some control over social media platforms.
Rightly, many people are terrified. The company has been quite explicit that it is committed to tolerating and normalizing the discourse of the far right, which includes denying the dignity of people in many communities, particularly queer folks. This move reflects the kind of naked power that this company has always been able to exert over speech, and its ability to determine what the bounds of acceptable speech in society are. As the political winds shift, the company appears to be embracing that shift across its networks. We should be asking ourselves whether we can continue to place so much trust in a company that can abruptly remove protections in this way.
There is a solution, fortunately, according to the giant brains of academia:
What’s hopeful to me is a growing movement of people embracing other kinds of social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky. … You could look at an example like Wikipedia – a widely trusted utility on the internet that is mission-driven and organized as a nonprofit.
Here are Zuck’s plans for today (AP):
Compare to 2020: “Facebook censors The Post to help Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign” (nobody could suggest that people had been bribing then-VP Joe Biden via Hunter Biden or amplify the misinformation that the Hunter Biden laptop was somehow genuine).
A literal-minded friend in a chat group explained the motivation for Zuck’s elimination of (Democrat) fact-checkers just as the White House was turning over to Republican rule:
He has principles
An immigrant from Eastern Europe in the same group:
when did he have principles, before biden or now?
(My main question about Facebook is how it can be so jammed with pig butchers compared to the purported unregulated hellscape of Twitter. Maybe the answer is that Facebook is explicitly about friendship and therefore it makes sense to try to befriend someone on Facebook?)
Related:
- Bill Gates develops an entirely new opinion and, perhaps, new principles… “Bill Gates had ‘intriguing’ three-hour dinner with Trump: ‘I was frankly impressed’” (New York Post)
Lol