Unless you’ve been living on the moon or under a rock, you probably know that on Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major change in the company’s policy around free speech and fact-checking. Wearing his new uniform of curly hair and a gold neck chain (and a $900,000 watch) to address his subjects… er, users, Zuck described the changes as a restoration of “free expression” on the company’s platforms and a return to Facebook’s free-speech roots, but what it boils down to is the removal of almost all the guardrails that Meta has erected over the past few years around hate speech and misinformation, ever since the company came under fire during the 2016 election (Kevin Roose also noted in the NYT that when it comes to roots, Facebook “was inspired by a hot-or-not website for Harvard students, not a Cato Institute white paper”).
As Wired pointed out in the wake of the news, if you want to go on Facebook or Instagram and say that someone who is trans or gay is mentally ill, you are totally free to do so now. Could you say “f u, retard,” as Elon Musk did to someone on his platform this week? I haven’t checked, but I assume that you could. Now that’s what I call freedom! Of course the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which specializes in disinformation, says that the changes could embolden authoritarian regimes and put Meta’s own users at risk, but hey — the price of freedom, right?
Zuckerberg and Meta’s newly appointed head of global affairs, Joel Kaplan—a former chief of staff under George W. Bush — said they are shutting down the company’s fact-checking program, which was launched in 2016 and at its peak involved dozens of media partners. Instead, Zuckerberg said Facebook and Instagram would implement a community approach similar to X’s “Community Notes” program, which crowdsources corrections from users (and has been criticized for moving too slowly and having little impact). The company also said that its content-moderation teams will be moving to Texas from California, in order to remove any concerns that “biased employees are overly censoring content.” (But aren’t there biased people in Texas who might also do this? Pipe down in the back now — the adults are talking.)
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