Meta, not X, is a Social Media Company that Defends Anti-Democracy and Forbids Hate Speech
There is a social networking company that has close ties to the Trump administration. It has a system in place for fighting misinformation and it also allows comments that are racist to fly under the flag of free speech. It’s got a hefty side-gig in AI. It is opening a shop in Texas. It is run by a man worth hundreds of billions of dollars and who has a young fashion sense. No, not X. It is Meta.
This is a monumental week on the politics and tech beat. On Tuesday, Meta announced that it would be ending its third-party fact-checking program and cutting down its rules barring hate speech in a move clearly targeted at appeasing one person—incoming president Donald Trump.
“I’ve been expecting Meta to axe this program for years,” says Alexios Matzarlis, director of Cornell University’s Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative and founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped establish the partnership between Facebook and fact-checkers in 2016. “But not in this manner and with this timing, which is so nakedly political.”
The fact-checking program and other efforts have been expanded over time, making it hard for users and not allowing free expression, which Kaplan wrote is a reason why they are being stopped. “We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.”
How Facebook Ends the Internet’s Future Is Looking Bleaker by the Day? Commentary on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Update to its Community Guidelines
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. There is a word for word comment on videos from people with disabilities. People say this because they think it is easier to be mean to others on social media. The commenters would be harassed if these users posted to Reels instead of TikTok.
This week is when TikTok stares down a nationwide ban. Mark Zuckerberg has decided to make his platforms more frightening to appease the incoming president.
Kate Knibbs reported this week on the update to Meta’s Community Guidelines which allows users to make blatantly anti-gay, 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.’” Doing so immediately following the anniversary of January 6 is truly something to behold!
Why do you destroy protections for Meta’s most vulnerable users? According to a video statement from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, and that the policies were out of touch with mainstream discourse. (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. Free expression, it seems, is identical with whatever Meta happens not to be banning at a given moment.)
Source: The Internet’s Future Is Looking Bleaker by the Day
TikTok: Why the U.S. isn’t going to stop using iTikiKota’s app
The Supreme Court will also take up TikTok’s lawsuit against the US government and its attempts to ban the app nationwide. The deadline for a sale or extension is less than a month away and the court does not have a lot of time to save the app.
