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Mark Zuckerberg follows Musk's lead on Internet Censorship
Zuckerberg has always been the tech Mogul I found most sympathetic as a genuine person trying to do right by the user. He provided real pushback against calls for censorship, and only buckled under immense pressure from the 2020 "Stop Hate for Profit" ad boycott campaign.
But now he is changing course, and the video is pretty shocking for how direct it is. Zuckerberg restates commitment to First Amendment and free speech values and then points the finger at Government and woke culture for unjustly pressuring censorship of speech. He doesn't mince words, Zuckerberg frames this as a real course-correction to oppose pressure from Government, specifically calls out the censorship regime of the EU, and calls out the cultural excess that led to unfair political censorship. He's pulling the moderation team out of California to Texas to be more fair.
He's even dropping Fact Checkers and moving to a Community Notes system like X.
This feels like another significant step in the general Vibe Shift in online discourse. This is most significant to me because Musk is no longer the only one doing what he is doing with X. It is crazy that only a couple of years ago the entire Dissident Right was banished to the Telegram ghettos, and now they are receiving huge engagement, including engagement with Musk himself, on X.
I don't think this means Meta will become a DR stronghold like X has become. But I do think it means Musk has another powerful ally in the anti-censorship wing of Tech so this arrangement may be less fragile and less of an anomaly than it has been recently.
Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan
Zuckerberg says that the EU is fining American tech companies 100 million here, a billion there and that it is all adding up. He says that the US government should protect US tech companies. Then he says "all these fines are basically like a tariff" and my ears perked up. Speculation: I now 100% believe that this was the angle Zuckerberg was using when he was talking with Trump. I wonder how much money and time the billionaires Trump is meeting are spending trying to phrase things in a way that Trump would respond well to. Sure, Zuckerberg could've just went with a generic right wing deregulation argument, but calling it a tariff makes Trump way more likely to remember it.
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He's a censorious worm in league with the intelligence agencies.
Now that the vibe shift is making that seem like less of a good thing, he's backpedaling.
Your charity runs dangerously close to gullibility.
A few possibilities
Zuckerberg is a weather vane and just follows the vibe wherever it shifts. He is changing now just cause the vibe shifted. (sub-possibility 1: he shifts for the money. sub-possibility 2: he is legitimately just a sheep and follows the crowd)
Zuckerberg is a "censorious worm". Trump winning means he can't censor as much as wants anymore so he will lay low until he can censor again (alternatively, he will work with Trump to censor now that he is in power)
Zuckerberg, like many people in silicon valley, always had pro free speech leanings. However, since he was running a company he censored more than he wanted to. Eventually, he realized that censorship both isn't effective and the bar for what needs to be censored will continuously be raised, so, with the recent vibe shift, he reverted to his pro free speech stance.
Zuckerberg, like many Americans, had a genuine shift in belief. Similar to 3, but instead of him censoring more than he wanted to, he was actually convinced that he should censor more and that this time was justified. Eventually, like many other Americans, he realized censorship doesn't work, so he shifted back to pro free speech
Right now, I think possibility 4 is the most likely but maybe I'm just naive
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My translation:
"We were just offered amazing tax incentives in Texas, and the fact checkers were really expensive. We really didn't want to decrease profit margins as user interaction on our website declines, and also please do not notice how we attempted to fill the userbase with fake ai users just a week ago. We think conservative users are particularly gullible to this scam"
You are not sufficiently blackpilled if you go to bat for Zuckerberg, of all people.
Greg Abbott regularly courts companies to relocate to Texas, but when he can reasonably expect not to be contradicted by that company's owner/CEO he claims credit for the jobs from it. If Texas offered some kind of sweetheart deal, Greg Abbott would be bragging about it.
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More so than tax incentives they don't benefit from going to war against a large portion of their base. Facebook's users in the US coincide fairly well with boomer conservatives. Alienating millions of users for purity isn't going to be profitable. Driving millions of users away by being woke or even banning them is bad for business. Besides, politics creates user engagement.
At peak banning even Trump supporters were getting banned. That is a huge demographic for facebook adds, partially because of their numbers and partially because trump does well among reasonably well of people that can be target through digital advertising. Democrats have a lot of underclass voters which aren't great for advertising and their more elite voters are less likely to want to use facebook.
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Zuck was pressured to ban Holocaust denial on the platform like it had already been on Amazon, Youtube, etc. but he held strong until they brought out the big guns with the huge 2020 ad boycotts. He at least put up some resistance rather than immediately going to the "of course we can't have that content, it's unconscionable" route. So that earned him some credit even though he eventually folded. It will be interesting to see if Holocaust revisionism gets unbanned on that platform like it's tacitly been unbanned on X.
He did mention growing censorship laws, and Holocaust denial censorship is growing rapidly in Europe with new laws in new countries continuing apace. Makes me wonder if he is going to reverse course on banning that as well. I, for the record, do not think the Fact Checker reform is just about saving costs I think Zuckerberg is being sincere in the video.
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“The fact checkers have just been too politically biased.”
Wild. As always, no one on the outside will know which folks are true believers and which are just weather vanes. Of course, I also note that every single specific item mentioned will reduce FB's costs (and including "civic content" will likely increase engagement and revenue).
I mean, it is obviously true that their fact checkers were biased. FB knew that when they implemented system because the government was hinting at them that if they didn't do left wing censorship they'd get hit with lawsuits. FB did the thing and got the lawsuits anyways, so its an obvious move to eliminate a program that provides no value to users, and in fact, often prevented them from getting what they wanted.
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Zuck just named Dana White to the board of Meta as well.
The MMA to right wing pipeline is undefeated.
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An uncomfortably large amount of human behavior, even at the very top, is just blindly following the herd. YouTube and Twitter banned Fuentes? Guess Facebook will too. They banned the president of the United States? Right behind you. Zuck’s heart was never in it. I don’t think he sees himself as a particularly ethics-driven person to begin with. Onlyfans-shilling thots are considered spam on the other platforms; on Instagram, they’re the content.
If you’re the head of a publicly traded corpo you kind of have to. Taking a principled stand that loses 25 percent of the company’s revenue can literally get you sued by the shareholders.
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