Zuckerberg Makes Meta Worse to Please Trump
With his decision to gut moderation and fact-checking on Meta’s platforms, Instagram, Facebook and Threads, Mark Zuckerberg shows he cares more about the approval of Donald Trump than how his platforms can harm society.
The measures he announces are simplistic and damaging, given the power of his platforms to influence the spread of information and discussion amongst over 3 billion people.
But the measures are transparently designed to please Trump and his supporters. Further cutting fact-checking will obviously not reduce mistakes, as he claims to care about. Rather, it will facilitate the spread of lies like the 2020 election steal or Haitians eating pets, which lead to violence.
Moving content moderation teams to Texas clearly does not show a ‘de-biasing’ – it is self-evidently a ploy for Republican approval. We remind Zuckerberg of the dangerous anti-free-speech actions taking by people who he is now trying to please, which run against the freedom of expression he claims is at the “roots” of Meta platforms. He must instead consider actual positive steps to ensure reliable, pluralistic, and not dangerously one-sided speech on his platforms.
More broadly, this is another warning of how our information space – which underpins our democracies and societal conversations – is so strongly in the hands of a few individuals who can make such blatantly self-interested decisions.
Against this background, it is high time that the Federal Council publishes its long awaited draft law on online platforms. Platforms and their owners must be held accountable when they accept negative consequences and undermine constructive public discourse in order to maximize their profit. To ensure this, AlgorithmWatch CH will closely watch and accompany the process around the platform law.