Facebook, Threads, and Instagram Didn’t Disturbatively Discriminate When Donald Trump Becomes a Presidential Candidate
Zuckerberg didn’t explain why people who live in Texas would be less prone to bias than those who live in California, but that was perhaps besides the point. Meta is vying to get into good graces of the new administration with a number of moves including the addition of Dana White to their board and the promotion ofJoel Kaplan to chief global affairs officer. In response, President-elect Trump praised the announcement. He said that the change was probably a result of his threatening to kill Zuckerberg, but he still believed that they had come a long way.
In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking his new curly hairdo and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale was based on the talking points that have been used for years by right-wing legislators, pundits and Trump himself. The new political regime feels like a tipping point for once again prioritized speech and that is something that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explicitly mentioned in the video.
The content moderation policies required by Facebook were forced on them by the legacy media. “After Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said. We tried to address the concerns without being arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created.
In Zuckerberg’s telling, the main impetus for the change is the desire to boost “free expression.” Meta had become too strict in restricting the speech of users so the thrust of the changes was to let freedom.
Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, Silicon Valley has made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, and contributedmillions of dollars to his inaugural fund. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.”
Facebook Moves to Texas to Over-Moderate Political Content and Implications for Free Speech and the Digital Economy: Meta, WIRED, Starlink and the Boring Company
Meta has axed its third party fact-checking program and replaced it with a Community Notes model that allows users to flag content they believe to be incorrect or misleading.
Kaplan did not say what topics the new rules would cover, but he said they would allow more speech by lifting the restrictions on topics that are part of mainstream discourse.
Facebook will streamline its content policies and remove restrictions on certain topics that are out of step with the mainstream society, according to founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta was criticized for taking a hands-off approach to content moderation after the high profile elections across the globe.
Kaplan also blasted fact-checking experts for their “biases and perspectives” which led to over-moderation: “Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.
Last year, WIRED reported that dangerous content, like medical misinformation, had flourished on the platform, while groups like anti-government militias had used Facebook to recruit new members.
In the fall of 2015, Musk moved his companies to Texas, where Starlink and the Boring Company are also based. California has a gender identity law that Musk cited as the reason for the move. The new policy changes from Meta appear to allow users to make claims that gay and trans people have mental illnesses.
The move to Texas seems to have more advantages than just posturing. Texas is one of two states—the other is Florida—with a law essentially forbidding moderation of a great deal of content on social media platforms. The regulatory system is friendly to companies. The leader is X owner and centibillionaire Elon Musk.
“They’re obviously following Elon Musk’s lead,” says Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech. “Just by the signal [sent by] moving their base of operations from what is perceived to be a liberally biased state—it’s not—to what’s perceived to be a Republican or conservative-coded state.”
In 2021, following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the state passed a law that banned social media companies from removing or moderating content based on the user’s political views. State officials could then mandate that platforms keep certain content up in the name of free speech.