Mark Zuckerberg’s alliance with Donald Trump proves just how low he’ll go
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The Facebook and Instagram boss has shown just how deep he’s willing to stoop for the benefit of his commercial empire — and just how little his last eight years of promises really meant, writes Io Dodds. This week’s changes at the world’s biggest social media company has been a clear mask-off moment.
Not for Mark Zuckerberg, mind you. If you've followed him as long as I have, you'll know that when the boss of Facebook and Instagram takes off one mask, there's invariably another waiting underneath. But for the apps' parent company Meta, Zuckerberg's new Donald Trump-friendly reforms expose the emptiness of all the solemn pledges and apologies it made during its past eight years of claiming to care about misinformation and bigotry.
The most consequential change is that Meta will "dial back" the sensitivity of its content moderation AI, instructing it to err on the side of catching too little rather than censoring too much. The most eye-catching is the cancellation Meta's fact-checking program, in which the company sent disputed articles to independent journalists then choked off traffic to articles rated false.
Meta has also loosened its hate speech rules, adding new exceptions for anti-trans content. The company will stop throttling political content on its services, and move its trust and safety team from woke, biased California to unbiased, apolitical Texas.
