Yaёl Eisenstat writes:

Mark Zuckerberg announced a spate of changes in Meta’s approach to speech and moderation issues this week, part of his longstanding effort to dominate the information landscape while resisting responsibility for his company’s contributions to political violence, extremism, and other antidemocratic activities in the United States and around the world. Let’s talk about the most serious implications.

Two of the key changes are that Meta will end fact-checking and roll back content moderation. According to reporting from 404 Media, many Meta employees were angry and felt blindsided by these changes, as there was not an internal policy and stakeholder engagement process driving the decision. This reinforces the impression that this is little more than a quid pro quo on Zuckerberg’s part for soliciting Trump’s help in pushing back against regulators. The full spectrum of changes will lead to even more hate and extremism while ignoring the systemic issues of how Meta’s platforms actually contribute to harm.

It’s important to note that this was not a sudden “bending the knee” to Donald Trump. Zuckerberg has a history of reacting to threats from politicians who have the power to impose costs on the company. I saw this tendency firsthand when I was hired by Facebook (now Meta) in 2018, ostensibly to head the company’s election-integrity efforts for political advertising.

I proposed a plan—built and supported by engineers and program managers across the company—to ensure we were not allowing (and profiting from) ads that potentially engaged in voter suppression. We had the tools and ability to protect the integrity of the elections, which Zuckerberg had publicly promised to do. But it would have likely meant taking action against more content from candidates on the right, including Trump, because, as research has demonstrated, the right engaged in political misinformation at higher rates.

Zuckerberg knew this would come at a political cost, so he made it clear he would not fact-check political candidates—not even in paid advertising, and not even if those ads contained blatant lies about voting. And in 2020, after Trump threatened to “shut down” social media because Twitter fact-checked him, Zuckerberg went on Fox News to announce that he would retreat even further from fact-checking. [Continue reading…]