Why Meta shouldn’t change the Hate Policy: Why it isn’t: a warning tale for the future of Meta and Kaplan
It should be a cautionary tale, instead of being a North Star for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Users and advertisers fled in droves after Musk took. It is common to see far right debate-me edgelord accounts on timelines. (And that’s just the owner.) Meta wants this to be the future it wants.
It may soon be hard to tell the difference. Meta said this week it was going to change its Hate policy to favor of X’s community notes model and used the fig leaf of “free speech” to do so. Last week, it appointed friend of Donald Trump and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to its board, and elevated Kaplan, who is firmly entrenched in Republican circles.
Alexios Matzarlis is the director of Cornell University’s Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative, and a founding director of the International Fact-checking Network, which helped create the partnership between Facebook and fact-checkers. “But not in this manner and with this timing, which is so nakedly political.”
So at what cost? Well, potentially plenty. Fact-checking is not beyond reproach and community notes can be effective. The announcement of the changes by Kaplan gave little hope that this will be an upgrade.
Is Facebook Harassing Facebook? How Facebook Deletes TikTok Comments on Videos of Teens Who Slepton
I usually come across it as a compliment to a video of a teenager doing something that other people will find cringe-worthy, like singing out of key or sucking at something. Even more upsettingly, you’ll find that comment, word for word, on videos from people with disabilities simply existing. These commenters think that it is simpler to be nasty to people on Meta platforms. The subtext is that if these users posted to Reels instead of TikTok, they’d receive the harassment the commenters believe they deserve.
And yet, it’s TikTok staring down the barrel of a nationwide ban this week. Mark Facebook has made his platforms more dangerous in order to appease the incoming president.
This week, Kate Knibbs reported on a new update to Meta’s Community Guidelines that allows users to make blatantly homophobic, transphobic, sexist, and racist posts without consequences. For Platformer, Casey Newton noted that, lost amongst other changes, Meta removed a sentence from its guidelines “explaining that hateful speech can ‘promote offline violence.’” It is truly incredible to do it immediately after the anniversary of January 6.
Why not protect Meta’s most vulnerable users? The policies are out of touch with mainstream discourse and recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again favoring speech, said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a video statement. (Zuckerberg, no one’s idea of a political theorist, didn’t really explain why fact-checking, itself the sort of speech that free-speech activists have long held is the appropriate reaction to bad speech, isn’t worth prioritizing, nor did he explain what he has against the many forms of speech that Meta will still suppress. It seems that free expression is not different from whatever Meta does not ban at a given moment.
TikTok and the U.S. Supreme Court: Can a $Phi4$-Scale Android App survive a nationwide ban?
The Supreme Court will also take up TikTok’s lawsuit against the US government and its attempts to ban the app nationwide. We are now less than two weeks out from the deadline for a sale or an extension, so the court doesn’t have a lot of time to save the app—if that’s even what it ends up doing.