Four years ago this week, social media companies decided they would stop platforming then-outgoing president Donald Trump after he celebrated seditionists who had broken into the U.S. Capitol Building in a failed attempt to invalidate the election and allow Trump to stay in power. After two campaigns and a presidency in which he tested the limits of what those platforms would allow, enthusiasm for a violent attack on government was apparently one step too far. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg explained:
Over the last several years, we have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies. We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech. But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.
Zuckerberg, it would seem, now has regrets — not about doing too little over those and the subsequent years, but about doing too much. For Zuckerberg, the intervening four years have been stifled by “censorship” on Meta’s platforms; so, this week, he announced a series of sweeping changes to their governance. He posted a summary on Threads but the five-minute video is far more loaded, and it is what I will be referring to. If you do not want to watch it — and I do not blame you — the transcript at Tech Policy Press is useful. The key changes:
Fact-checking is to be replaced with a Community Notes feature, similar to the one on X.
Change the Hateful Conduct policies to be more permissive about language used in discussions about immigration and gender.
Make automated violation detection tools more permissive and focus them on “high-severity” problems, relying on user reports for material the company thinks is of a lower concern.
Roll back restrictions on the visibility and recommendation of posts related to politics.
Relocate the people responsible for moderating Meta’s products from California to another location — Zuckerberg does not specify — and move the U.S.-focused team to Texas.
Work with the incoming administration on concerns about governments outside the U.S. pressuring them to “censor more”.
Regardless of whether you feel each of these are good or bad ideas, I do not think you should take Zuckerberg’s word for why the company is making these changes. Meta’s decision to stop working directly with fact-checkers, for example, is just as likely a reaction to the demands of FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, who has a bananas view (PDF) of how the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution works. According to Carr, social media companies should be forbidden from contributing their own speech to users’ posts based on the rankings of organizations like NewsGuard. According both Carr and Zuckerberg, fact-checkers demand “censorship” in some way. This is nonsense: they were not responsible for the visibility of posts. I do not think much of this entire concept, but surely they only create more speech by adding context in a similar way as Meta hopes will still happen with Community Notes. Since Carr will likely be Trump’s nominee to run the FCC, it is important for Zuckerberg to get his company in line.
Meta’s overhaul of its Hateful Conduct policies also shows the disparity between what Zuckerberg says and the company’s actions. Removing rules that are “out of touch with mainstream discourse” sounds fair. What it means in practice, though, is to allow people to make COVID-19 more racist, demean women, and — of course — discriminate against LGBTQ people in more vicious ways. I understand the argument for why these things should be allowed by law, but there is no obligation for Meta to carry this speech. If Meta’s goal is to encourage a “friendly and positive” environment, why increase its platforms’ permissiveness to assholes? Perhaps the answer is in the visibility of these posts — maybe Meta is confident it can demote harmful posts while still technically allowing them. I am not.
We can go through each of these policy changes, dissect them, and consider the actual reasons for each, but I truly believe that is a waste of time compared to looking at the sum of what they accomplish. Conservatives, particularly in the U.S., have complained for years about bias against their views by technology companies, an updated version of similar claims about mass media. Despite no evidence for this systemic bias, the myth stubbornly persists. Political strategists even have a cute name for it: “working the refs”. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Creators Syndicate, August 1992:
But in a moment of candor, [Republican Party Chair Rich] Bond provided insight into the Republicans’ media-bashing: “There is some strategy to it,” he told the Washington Post. “I’m the coach of kids’ basketball and Little League teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.”
Zuckerberg and Meta have been worked — heavily so. The playbook of changes outlined by Meta this week are a logical response in an attempt to court scorned users, and not just the policy changes here. On Monday, Meta announced Dana White, UFC president and thrice-endorser of Trump, would be joining its board. Last week, it promoted Joel Kaplan, a former Republican political operative, to run its global policy team. Last year, Meta hired Dustin Carmack who, according to his LinkedIn, directs the company’s policy and outreach for nineteen U.S. states, and previously worked for the Heritage Foundation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Ron DeSantis. These are among the people forming the kinds of policies Meta is now prescribing.
This is not a problem solved through logic. If it were, studies showing a lack of political bias in technology company policy would change more minds. My bet is that these changes will not have what I assume is the desired effect of improving the company’s standing with far-right conservatives or the incoming administration. If Meta becomes more permissive for bigots, it will encourage more of that behaviour. If Meta does not sufficiently suggest those kinds of posts because it wants “friendly and positive” platforms, the bigots will cry “shadowban”. Meta’s products will corrode. That does not mean they will no longer be influential or widely used, however; as with its forthcoming A.I. profiles, Meta is surely banking that its dominant position and a kneecapped TikTok will continue driving users and advertisers to its products, however frustratedly.
Zuckerberg appears to think little of those who reject the new policies:
[…] Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better.
I am allergic to the phrase “virtue signalling” but I am willing to try getting through this anyway. This has been widely interpreted as because of their virtue signalling, but I think it is just as accurate if you think of it as because of our virtue signalling. Zuckerberg has complained about media and government “pressure” to more carefully moderate Meta’s platforms. But he cannot ignore how this week’s announcement also seems tied to implicit pressure. Trump is not yet the president, true, but Zuckerberg met with him shortly after the election and, apparently, the day before these changes were announced. This is just as much “virtue signalling” — particularly moving some operations to Texas for reasons even Zuckerberg says are about optics.
Perhaps you think I am overreading this, but Zuckerberg explicitly said in his video introducing the changes that “recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech”. If he means elections other than those which occurred in the U.S. in November, I am not sure which. These are changes made from a uniquely U.S. perspective. To wit, the final commitment in the list above as explained by Zuckerberg (via the Tech Policy Press transcript):
Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.
For their part, the E.U. rejected Zuckerberg’s characterization of its policies, and Brazilian officials are not thrilled, either.
These changes — and particularly this last one — are illustrative of the devil’s bargain of large U.S.-based social media companies: they export their policies and values worldwide following whatever whims and trends are politically convenient at the time. Right now, it is important for Meta to avoid getting on the incoming Trump administration’s shit list, so they, like everyone, are grovelling. If the rest of the world is subjected to U.S.-style discussions, so be it. But so have we been for a long time. What is extraordinary about Meta’s changes is how many people will be impacted: billions, plural. Something like one-quarter the world’s population.
The U.S. is no stranger to throwing around its political and corporate power in a way few other nations can. Meta’s changes are another entry into that canon. There are people in some countries who will benefit from having more U.S.-centric policies, but most everyone elsewhere will find them discordant with more local expectations. These new policies are not satisfying for people everywhere around the world, but the old ones were not, either.
It is unfair to expect any platform operator to get things right for every audience, especially not at Meta’s scale. The options created by less centralized protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol are much more welcome. We should be able to have more control over our experience than we are trusted with.
Zuckerberg begins his video introduction by referencing a 2019 speech he gave at Georgetown University. In it, he speaks of the internet creating “significantly broader power to call out things we feel are unjust”. “[G]iving people a voice and broader inclusion go hand in hand,” he said, “and the trend has been towards greater voice over time”. Zuckerberg naturally centred his company’s products. But you know what is even more powerful than one company at massive scale? It is when no company needs to act as the world’s communications hub. The internet is the infrastructure for that, and we would be better off if we rejected attempts to build moats.
