Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is getting out of the misinformation business:
We're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X.... The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.
....We're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our US content review is going to be based in Texas... I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there's less concern about the bias of our teams.
He then name checks Trump ("We're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies") and takes a shot at Biden ("Over the past four years...even the US government has pushed for censorship").
I'm not too surprised by this, but I would have guessed differently on the motivations. Fact checking is a pain in the ass and it's expensive, so getting rid of it cuts back on trouble and cuts costs at the same time.
But Zuckerberg makes it pretty clear that even if he hasn't gone full MAGA, he's pretty sympathetic to it. He's clear that Trump's election represents a "tipping point," and he plans to be on the right side of it. And moving content moderation to Texas! He could hardly be more symbolically MAGA.
It's always been the case that Zuckerberg's principles mysteriously always match what's best for Facebook's business, and it looks like that hasn't changed. Joining Team Trump is good for business, so that's now a deeply held belief too.
Trump is promising to clear the path for billionaires to make even more billions.
That may not work out for the non-billionaires they way they are thinking.
Trump is also apparently promising to go to war with our ancient and hated enemy, Denmark.
So, he's not just engaging in pro-billionaire policies; he's also going full steam ahead on outright farces.
Hey, man, whatever gets the ratings up. The party complaining about war is agitating for an enemy. Apparently, they don't have enough people to hate as is.
See also Wicked: "To unite the people, give them a real good enemy". Making immigrants the enemy got him elected, but getting rid of the immigrants will cripple the economy so he's in search of a new enemy.
It's all subterfuge. We'll depot a couple hundred thousands sitting in jail cells and Oh, Look. Squirrel!
Just remember: We have always been at war with Denmark...
Hoard your Lego bricks now! Denmark will enforce a Lego embargo once the war starts.
It may not work for the billionaires either. Trump's patron Putin has no trouble presiding over a country in which billionaires face astronomically higher chances of falling out of windows than the general population as a whole. I hope American billionaires have prepared their knees for a lifetime of sucking Trump's dick.
History is clear that eventually authoritarian rule doesn't even work out well for most of the billionaires/oligarchs.
Here in Texas, we are totally not biased
These people are collaborators.
They need to be treated the way collaborators with any repressive regime were/ are treated.
+1
Are you indeed going to sharpen your torch and light your pitchfork, or will you instead get out there for the mid-terms?
Yep. The lines are being drawn pretty clearly. You're on team evil, or you're not.
What do you expect businessmen to do in a dictatorship?
Because that's what America is. Screw that hifalutin "authoritarian" language. For all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. All power in one person's control. Executive, Legislative, Judicial.
Once you understand that, everything makes sense (e.g. Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al kowtowing). The American public voted for this. They are responsible.
Our oligarch owners can look to Russia to see the pros and cons of obeying God Emperor Musk and his Good Friend Trump. Many spoils as long as they do not push back or criticize.
After all, there are a lot of windows in our oligarch owners' properties.
The ones that are wealthy enough ought to be smart enough to move a significant portion of their personal wealth out of the country, and be prepared to leave the US.
Leaving the US for where? Canada has been an option up till now, but that may disappear soon when Canada ceases to exist as a nation and becomes part of the USA.
Anyone using his products should cease immediately as possible.
Turn off comments, move engagement to a system which has protections and moderation.
Without moderation, your posts are going to be sitting in a sea of misinformation with equal value to actual scams.
Good luck with completely cutting off ties to Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Tesla,... the list of people lined up to fall to their knees before the King keeps growing... and still having any online presence at all.
Perhaps I’ve missed it, but what was Google’s kneeling?
I believe both Sergei Brin and Sundar Pichai have made the pilgrimage to Mar a Lago .
to be fair, cutting off ties to Tesla is pretty easy.
"He could hardly be more symbolically MAGA."
He could've moved the unit to Mar-a-Lago.
Yuck! Trump doesn't want a bunch of content-moderation computer nerds crowding around his swamp castle--they'd take up valuable space that could be devoted to storing pilfered documents, displaying gaudy dictator-chic gilded pink marble nonsense, and "entertaining" Chinese, Middle Eastern, and other foreign club members who are totally not spies.
I have never used Facebook because I did not want to participate in the enriching of Zuckerberg and his investors. Sometimes I regret not using Facebook because of how many other people use it to stay in contact, but not today.
+1
I deleted my account months if not a year ago. I don't miss it at all. It was bad back then, I can't imagine it after the changes.
As far as I can tell, FB is dying. And has been for a while. Most people I knw rarely post on FB. Unlike the past when those same people posted all the time. (myself included). And young people avoid it like the plague.
Agree with the content of this post, but the phrase “avoid like the plague” needs retiring. We learned over the past few years that a large fraction of people do not, in fact, take any significant action to avoid a plague.
If you did have an FB account and/or Instagram, etc you'd at least have had the satisfaction of leaving in disgust, after having posted some appropriate parting remarks to everybody who "followed" or "liked" you.
As it is, you're basically voiceless.
I wish I could take such a principled stand. There are very limited ways that a small business can connect with it's potential customers and two of them are controlled by Meta.
I stopped using it 5 or 6 years ago. I didn't shut down my FB account entirely, because one or two family members use FB Messenger, but I set it to "private" and haven't posted a thing since before the pandemic. I do use IG though.
Texas being less-than-friendly to women, pro-choice, trans and LGBTQIA+ people means he is guaranteed to employ (more) compliant people. I have a number of communities on FB I interact with - would be MORE than happy to move off if I could find a new home.
I hear you. If there was another source (Instagram seems to be the only alternative) for getting feeds of art and new recipes, I'd bail today. Everything is under the control of someone awful.
No state (even as awful a state as Texas) is a monolith. More people in Texas voted for Harris than voted for her in New York, (and nearly as many Californians voted for Trump as did Texans) for example, so it's not as if Zuckerberg would need to go to Texas to find a bunch of MAGA-weirdos if that's what he wanted.
I'd expect that moving content review to Texas is more about optics for idiots (see: Trump) and some cost savings (salaries are a lot lower in Texas than in Silicon Valley).
Bingo!
If Mr Z needs to hire techie type people in Tejas to do his non-moderation, he may find he gets folks from the blue enclaves around the state's innumerable universities who have graduated from or are attending said universities.
Many of you are assuming Zuckerberg will be hiring middle-aged to elderly sh*tkickers right off the ranch. Unlikely.
The term social media is a misnomer. Drop the social part, it's primary function is making money. Anything social about it is incidental. And if by chance harmful to profits, easily removed.
The funny thing about Zuckerberg is that about 15 years ago David Fincher made a movie about him in which he comes off as a greedy rage-filled psychopath, and it turns out it was wayyyy too nice to him.
Alexander Dubček popularized the principle of ’socialism with a human face’ before the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring. Doesn’t look like we’ll ever get capitalism with a human face, unless we can excise its inclination to reward amorality, unrestrained greed and sociopathy.
It's not just FB. Instagram as well. Today is the last straw. I will delete my Insta and FB accounts today.
I use them less and less anyway. Is Blue Sky the best alternative?
Bluesky is okay, but they have a quiet escape hatch in their internal policies and TOS: they won't ban anyone for anything they do off the platform.
So, how long before it is announced Meta will buy Truth Social…?
For how much? It can be hard to come up with the right amount of bribe.
"And moving content moderation to Texas!"
As long as it's not Austin. Putting it in Austin would be like moving it to Nancy Pelosi's rumpus room.
Facebook knows if you supported Harris. It will put you on the enemies list!
FB is built to do two things:
- create user profiles so that ad buyers can micro-target its audience;
- reinforce engagement and sharing of data to enable the first function
Facts are therefore, irrelevant.
"He's clear that Trump's election represents a "tipping point," and he plans to be on the right side of it. "
Bent over, pants down and all lubed up.
I know a young woman (I've known her since birth) who just got laid off by Meta. She was doing content moderation.
I think this is smoke screen and they are actually going to lean into using AI for content moderation. Yeah, they are moving to Texas, and making lots of gestures toward Trump. He holds the hammer now. He is making every signal that he will be off any leash.
However, he is easy to hoodwink with flattery. So that's what's happening.
"Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is getting out of the misinformation business:" That's the exact opposite of relity. Zeckerberg announced Facebok was etting into the misinformation business, or possibly they're getting out of the anti-misinformation business. This will be devastating to their ad revenue.
Zuckerberg has only ever implemented things like fact checking to get Congress off his ass. He half asses it until Congress' attention is distracted by the next shiny outrage and then calls it a day.
Sure, fact checking is politically biased. But that's because Republicans are allergic to facts.