Summary
Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta will eliminate factcheckers, reduce content censorship, and recommend more political content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
He emphasized prioritizing free speech, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Meta plans to replace factcheckers with “community notes,” similar to Elon Musk’s X platform, and shift content moderation teams to Texas.
Restrictions on sensitive topics like immigration and gender will be eased, focusing moderation on severe violations.
Critics and Meta’s oversight board urge external input to ensure effective, balanced content governance.
Another arm of the Trump administration. Goebbels would be amazed.
Yeahhh! Wooooooh! Fascism!!! Go go go go go!
– Mark Zuckerberg, probably
probablydefinitely.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”.
Well which side of the political spectrum’s just been spewing bullshit after bullshit to make fact checkers look like they are acting more heavy-handedly towards one side?
Not that logic matters to these people anyways. The idea has always been “I don’t like what these people are saying”, and they’ve now reached a point where they don’t even care if people call em out.
The doublespeak was hurting my brain, translating below:
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
Translation: Trump has lowered the bar, and we’re not going to waste time with higher standards than the lowest.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
Translation: The fact checkers destroyed the trust of right-wing cultists who do not trust reality. So to solve this, we removed the fact-checkers, so the cultists are free to further radicalize themselves and others without the burden of reality. We’re also moving the team to Texas, which is famously representative of how the country thinks (if you are a conservative).
Meta has more than 3 billion users globally. In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.
Translation: We’re going to try our best to please Trump, starting with allowing hate speech on immigration and gender.
He cited Europe as a place with “an everincreasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative” and said: “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.”
Translation: Europe has rules and holds us accountable. We don’t like rules and much prefer just being accountable to Trump, who doesn’t care what we do as long as we make him look good.
In his five-minute statement, Zuckerberg said: “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech.”
He said that removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration would “make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms” and he said the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be shifted to only tackling illegal and high severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower severity violations before it takes action.
Translation: Beliefs and experiences drive more engagement than facts. The recent elections proved that facts no longer matter to most people. We now only care about beliefs and experiences, unless the law makes us do otherwise.
bold move for an app whose user base joined largely because twitter sucked to make it more like twitter. let’s see how that plays out for them
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech.”
Reminds me of how Elron is saying they’re going to censor or punish “negative” speech, as decided by Elron. Just in reverse. I can imagine the type of opinions Zucker is planning to enable on FB etc due to the “recent elections”.
More political discussion sounds completely awful as having a constant stream of irritating or provocative political topics shoved in my face is why I left Twitter. Currently threads is surprisingly good about that, so makes sense they’re planning to ruin it.
As far as making their systems work better for not censoring things that don’t need to be censored, that would be nice as it’s been a legitimate problem. I don’t have a huge amount of confidence though as they’ve always been terrible about that, like Twitter.
Gotta love the brazen irony of eliminating fact checkers in order to encourage political content in the wake of Trump’s election.
It isn’t new. We had vance outright complain that facts were being checked while he was lying his ass off in his one debate.
This is just the trajectory that fascists have been working toward for decades. Intellectuals are villified by all sides (think about that the next time you see your favorite comedic character make fun of a teacher or a scientist because they “lack common sense” and so forth) and now we are at the point where “fact checking” is for liberals and their “fake news”
Ah good, about time we relaxed restrictions on hate speech directed at topics (groups) like immigrants and “gender” (aka LGBTQ+ and women). /s
Yeah I just got a message from Instagram Meta AI saying I asked for “reals on cooking steak”.
The fuck I did. I’m going to have to finally delete all this shit. I eat steak like once a year, and when I do, I cook that shit masterfully.
“I hope that guy gets murdered.”
What, that’s free speech. Which is a priority now. Under another guy “who should get murdered on, like, next Tuesday at 6pm.” And anyone who wants to posit that this is simply another hypocritcial move to flood the social waves with right-wing spewformation to lock in riches for the rich and pain for the poors is simply not a good businessman. Clearly there’s been an “overwhelming mandate” for “free speech”.
Because nothing matters and what if it did.
“We don’t claim this guy, at all. Literally any other generation can have him.” -Millennials
There is no generation war. There is a class war though, and this guy is not on our side.
Tech billionaires had 4 years to prepare for another Trump term and they‘re not wasting a second to go full fascist this time around. The parallels to industrials in and around 1930s Germany are horrifyingly staggering. These lizards only care about the bottom line. Always did.
So this means Meta will finally stop censoring any picture I post that has an inch of skin, even if it’s under three layers of clothing, as sexual activity. Right?
Right?
So this means Meta will finally stop censoring any picture that has an inch of skin, even if it’s under clothing, as sexual activity. Right?
Right?
Only if it is a child.
Facebook really needs to go back to people updating each other on their lives and not talking about…. Anything else.
