Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga | Siva Vaidhyanathan
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It’s also a mistake to describe the Meta CEO’s move as a retreat from ‘fact-checking’: it’s a retreat from limiting harm to users. Mark Zuckerberg seems to have gone full Maga. Just two weeks before Donald Trump assumes power over the world’s most powerful government, the CEO and founder of the most powerful collection of Internet companies has decided to capitalize on what is sure to be a large and fast retreat from accountability and regulatory curbs on corporate negligence.
Some might read Zuckerberg’s announcement on Tuesday that he will end the eight-year project to protect users from hatred, threats, harassment and violent imagery as an example of pandering to the president-elect’s own power or Elon Musk’s new role as regulatory consigliere to Trump.
That would get him wrong. Zuckerberg is reverting to his core beliefs because of opportunity, not aligning himself with Trump out of fear. Zuckerberg released a video in which he announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer subject user-uploaded content to a full content-moderation review executed by both Meta itself and a constellation of contractors around the world. Instead, users will have the burden of flagging and complaining about content that causes harm or spreads dangerous misinformation about health or vulnerable people. User-guided content moderation, as we have seen on the platform formerly known as Twitter, is ridiculously ineffective. And that’s the goal.
Zuckerberg, as anyone who has studied his actions, mind and statements over the past two decades would tell you, is firmly committed to the principle that he knows better than the rest of us and that his company’s services are good for us. The more we use them, the better we will live, he believes. The more we encounter messages that challenge us or trouble us, he believes, the more likely we are to forge better decisions for ourselves. The more we post, the more we encounter, the more we mix it up, the more we argue, the more we work toward a better society, Zuckerberg believes against all historical evidence to the contrary. He is not acting as a mercenary capitalist. He is acting as a megamaniacal ideologue, as usual.
