Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech is as deep as Exxon's commitment to clean energy
Meta's policy commitments never last longer than an election cycle
Here’s the thing: Silicon Valley executives have never enjoyed investing in content moderation.
Content moderation is difficult. It’s expensive. It’s a bummer.
When it goes well, no one notices. The Trust & Safety Team at Meta doesn’t make any particularly sexy number go up. A robust Trust & Safety program keeps your user base from hating you, and maybe fleeing. It keeps advertisers from yelling at you, and maybe boycotting. It prevents harm.
It’s also inevitably a mess — particularly for the largest platforms, where bad actors have plenty of reasons to test the boundaries. Spammers, scammers, and hustlers are going to look for an edge and use your rules against you. And sometimes those hustlers have a relationship with Rupert Murdoch or Jim Jordan or Donald Trump, so they’ll try to use their connections to get the rules changed.
Facebook built up its Trust & Safety program after the 2016 election debacle. The company’s name was getting dragged through the mud. There was the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the misinformation factories and the political ads paid for in Rubles. Mark Zuckerberg announced he was taking responsibility. It wouldn’t happen again.
He didn’t like it, though. And he didn’t mean it. Zuckerberg’s commitment to Trust & Safety was as deep as Exxon’s commitment to combating the climate crisis. He’ll only commit resources when it seems like he has to.
After January 6th, 2021, Facebook suspended Donald Trump’s account. “The risks of allowing the president to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg wrote.
He didn’t mean that either.
The thing that people forget about the platforms booting Trump after immediately January 6th was that it was also immediately after the evening Democrats won the two Georgia Senate seats (on January 5th). Donald Trump spent four years violating Facebook’s Terms of Service. His supporters organized the Stop the Steal effort through Facebook. And it wasn’t until it became clear that the Democratic Party would control the Presidency and both houses of Congress that Facebook decided Trump had crossed a line.
The real tell, even back then, was that Facebook decided to suspend his account FOR TWO YEARS! Meaning, coincidentally, that they would revisit the decision just before the next Congress would be gaveled into session.
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta only ever show courage when it’s convenient.
Zuckerberg took to Instagram Reels yesterday to announce his full, enthusiastic capitulation.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S.”
In place of the fact-checking program, Meta’s products will start using X-style Community Notes. They’ll relax their restrictions on “topics like immigration and gender” and tune their filters to “catch less bad stuff, but also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.” And they’re moving the remaining Trust & Safety and content moderation teams to Texas.
…Oh, and also, they’re going to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies.” (By which he clearly means “pressure the European Union to let Meta do whatever the hell we want.”)
All of this is, y’know, bad. It’s going to be open season on trans people and people of color on Meta’s platforms. Meta is going to give Jim Jordan and Donald Trump whatever they want. (And if you don’t like it, then you can sue Meta in Reed O’Connor’s Texas courtroom.)
But it’s also unsurprising. Community notes are cheaper than content moderation. The incoming political regime dislikes fact-checking. Why would Mark Zuckerberg pay extra money for a program that creates political hassles?
The idealistic answer is “because Meta doesn’t want another Myanmar genocide.” The pragmatic-but-idealistic answer is “because another Myanmar genocide, but this time in the U.S., would ultimately be bad for Facebook.”
But y’know what? The climate crisis is ultimately going to be bad for Exxon too. That doesn’t translate into any material commitments that can stand up to a changing political headwind.
I’ve seen a line of thinking crystalize amongst the centrist pundit-class, that this is all the fault of those mean leftist Democrats who embarked on an “anti-tech crusade” during the Biden years. Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith have both written substack entries along those lines. The latest contribution to the budding genre comes from Conor Sen:
He got roasted pretty hard on Bluesky for this take. Trump, as you may recall, threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison.”
The tech barons did not embrace Trump because they were a kinder, gentler alternative to the Democrats.
It’s as though Sen is begging everyone to post the classic Matt Bors comic. (don’t mind if I do…)
Only a bit of this argument is true. But it is, I think, an interesting bit.
SEC chair Gary Gensler didn’t threaten to throw Zuckerberg or Marc Andreessen in prison for life. But he did look at the crypto industry and say (basically) “most of these are obvious unregulated securities. We are going to apply existing law to them.”
FTC chair Lina Khan didn’t threaten to nationalize SpaceX or anything. But she did warn AI startups that lying about the capabilities of their products is, y’know, fraud.
Democrats during the Biden years spent four years behaving as though the government ought to govern, and that the rule of law should apply to everyone — even the big cool tech companies that are Building The Future.
That’s the existential threat these pundits are referring to. It’s a vibe. Democrats stopped treating tech billionaires like the world’s most special boys. They started insisting that the most powerful individuals in the world should bear some responsibility for the state of the world.
And the tech billionaires could not handle it.
The Republican threats, while much more clear and present, were also based in a much simpler and more satisfying ethical framework. It’s effectively just Wilhoit’s Law, writ large.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
What Jim Jordan and Elon Musk and Donald Trump and all the rest of them have been communicating is you tech billionaires can pick whether you would like to be members of the in-group or the out-group. And we will hurt you until you make the appropriate choice.”
What Sen and Yglesias and Smith and the rest of them are effectively saying is, “yes, the rule of law shouldn’t apply to tech billionaires. They deserve special treatment, and Democrats were fools for attempting to rein them in.
It would be nice if these fellas would state this clearly instead of retconning recent history to place the blame for billionaire acquiescence on a phantom anti-tech crusade.
Of course, billionaires would rather cozy up to people who promise to shield them from consequences. The saddest part? We keep hoping these platforms will want to do the right thing. Maybe that’s on us.
It’s always comforting to know that Meta’s moral backbone is about as sturdy as a paper straw.
Well said. The tell in Zuck's statement is the reference to "legacy media" which as we now know from Elon, "has to die."