Jan.10

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

...So Does Meta

This week, Meta has taken a number of steps that are clearly meant to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration. To wit:

• Meta appointed Joel Kaplan, a Republican insider and a Trumper, to take over for Nick Clegg as head of global policy.
  
  
• Dana White, the UFC CEO and close Trump ally who spoke at the RNC, was named to Meta's board of directors.
  
  
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and its other sites would no longer have fact-checking, and will move to a "community notes" system like eX-Twitter uses. So, a person—say, the President of the United States—can now post blatant falsehoods to Facebook or Instagram, and the only thing that (might) happen is that users will post a note asserting that the falsehood is not true.
  
  
• While Facebook, etc. will ostensibly still be moderated for hate speech, there will be one explicit exception. It will be acceptable to refer to LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill."
  
  
• The now-much-reduced-in-size content moderation department will no longer reside in California, and will be relocated to Texas. "This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content," explained Zuckerberg.

These changes are not entirely about kowtowing to Donald Trump and his acolytes. Meta has always longed to reduce its role in monitoring content, as that reduces costs (and, potentially, legal liabilities). Now, the company can implement a Wild West approach, and let it become ingrained for 4 years. At that point, it won't be too easy to change, even if a Democratic administration decided to try. However, if a future Democratic admininistration took steps to declare that Facebook is a publisher, not a platform, it could be sued for defamatory comments it allows to be posted.

That said, a big chunk of it is kowtowing to Trump, particularly since Meta is about to defend against a major antitrust suit. White is not, in any way, qualified to oversee a social media company. LGBTQ+ people are not mentally ill, and to allow people to claim otherwise is still hate speech, even if it's presented as "freedom of religion." And the shift of staff from California (blue) to Texas (red) is just theater. There's no evidence the moderators were "biased," and even if they were, there are plenty of conservatives in California and plenty of liberals in Texas. Shifting those jobs is not going to "cure" anything.

We guess we can understand where Zuckerberg is coming from. At the moment, he has more money than he could ever possibly spend. However, if Meta's stock price drops, then he could very well be reduced to... still having more money than he could ever possibly spend. Certainly seems a good reason to sell out. (Z)