Meta Takes a Principled Stance Against Having Principles ⇥ wbez.org

In January, Mark Zuckerberg bade farewell to the ostensibly censorial administration of Joe Biden, welcoming in the nominally free speech offered by Donald Trump’s then-incoming presidency. The complaints about Biden aired by Zuckerberg on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast were weak, misleading, and silly, but they helped continue the narrative championed by many U.S. politicians who are now in a position to help Meta.

In a video announcing the changes to the company’s moderation policy, Zuckerberg lamented the “censorship” users have faced, and promised to collaborate with the government to fight those demands:

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.

This explanation is mostly nonsense — and dishonest.

Nader Issa, WBEZ Chicago:

At the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, a Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people to report sightings of federal immigration agents in the Chicago area has been taken down by the social media giant Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

The group, called “ICE Sighting-Chicagoland,” has been increasingly used over the last five weeks of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s intense deportation campaign, to warn neighbors that federal agents are near schools, grocery stores and other community staples so they can take steps to protect themselves.

If this group was actually used for “coordinated harm”, as Meta claims, surely it or the Department of Justice could give some specific examples. I could only find one archived copy of the page and I see nothing of the sort in what is admittedly a handful of posts. I also do not see anything looking remotely like “coordinated harm” in the posts cached by Google.

The point is not Meta’s hypocrisy on what it will remove compared to what it will defend, but what this hypocrisy achieves. Meta spent years using a socially conscious image to help marginalized people feel safer, albeit only after a long history of controversy over privacy violations, harassment, and gender-based abuse (PDF).

Now it is using a combination of regressive policies and assisting the government’s domestic quasi-military invasions to ingratiate itself with this administration. If Meta were trying to appeal to the public or advertisers, it would not be so subservient to this administration — people in the U.S. are more suspicious of government power than in recent memory, and disapprove of ICE. Meta is completely on-board with this administration’s demands. If there is a line these companies will not cross, we might find it if we reach it.