The X-ification of Meta is done
Meta, PolitiFact, and Kaplan: Why does it matter if it’s a warning tale or a Trojan horse?
X seems like it should be a cautionary tale rather than a North Star for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Advertisers and users have fled in droves since Musk took. There are increasingly far-right debate-me edgelord accounts that post a constant flow of misinformation. (And that’s just the owner.) Meta made it clear that this is the future it wants.
Alex Mahavedan, a director of the Poynter Institute’s digital media literacy project, says it will be an unmitigated disaster. PolitiFact, which is a Meta fact-checking partner, is also operated by the Poynter Institute. Meta endangers a permissiveness that allows misinformation to flourish because it puts too much emphasis on “free speech” as the ultimate goal. He is not the only one.
The head of Cornell University’s Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative and founding director of the International Fact-checking Network says that he has been expecting Meta to axe the program for years. “But not in this manner and with this timing, which is so nakedly political.”
At what price? Well, potentially plenty. Fact-checking is not beyond reproach, and community notes can be effective as part of a broader moderation system. But little in Kaplan’s announcement of the changes—or Zuckerberg’s accompanying video—gave much hope that this will be an upgrade.
How Bad is the Meta of Bad Speech? Commentary on Mark Zuckerberg in a Video on the Internet’s Future is Looking Bleaker by the Day
Often, I’ll come across it as a comment on a video of a teenager on TikTok doing something that could easily be considered embarrassing, like singing out of key or obsessing over something others find cringe. This is upsetting because you will find that comment, word for word, on the videos from people with disabilities. Some commenters say it is easier to be nasty to people on Meta platforms than it is to be nice to them. 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. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, has decided to make his platforms more dangerous to appease the incoming president.
This week, my colleague Kate Knibbs reported that a recent update to Meta’s Community Guidelines allowed users to make blatantly homophobia, transphobia, sexism, 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.’” After the anniversary of January 6 it is truly amazing to do so immediately.
Why destroy protections for Meta’s most vulnerable users? The policies are out of touch with mainstream discourse and the recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, which is what Mark Zuckerberg said in a video statement on Tuesday. (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 appears that free expression is the same as whatever Meta does not ban at a given moment.
How long will the Supreme Court save TikTok from the US government if we don’t stop talking about it? A critical update on the app
The Supreme Court is expected to take up TikTok’s lawsuit against the US government regarding its attempts to ban the app. 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.