I have an important announcement to make. Mark Zuckerberg has CENSORED ME. No, seriously! Last month, I made a video talking about how the average person like you or me might respond to Donald Trump’s plan to absolutely destroy food safety standards in the United States. That’s not conjecture or hyperbole or, god forbid, misinformation: I read directly from the Project 2025 playbook, written by the people who previously advised and are currently advising Donald Trump, and I also cited investigative reporting that revealed what actions Trump took during his first term to limit the effectiveness of the FDA to protect our food supply.
Despite all that data backing up my point, Facebook, owned by Meta who also owns Instagram, decided that that video violated their community standards on spam in that I was trying “to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.”
I’ll be honest, I don’t really use Facebook that often, even to promote my videos. Many many years ago, I set up a Facebook page for my website Skepchick.org, and Facebook has a feature that allows you to auto post from the website to the Facebook page. That’s been running for, I don’t know, the past decade or two, without a problem. All my other posts are still there. I contested it but it’s been a month and I haven’t heard back either way, which I think is corporate-speak for “fuck off and die already.”
But there is some hope for me: beginning this week, there’s a much lower chance that an inflexible algorithm will falsely categorize my fact-based content as spam, because Mark Zuckerberg has announced he’s giving it up. No one can complain about being unfairly moderated if there’s no moderation, right?
Well, that’s not fair. There is still going to be SOME moderation on Facebook and Instagram: for instance, Meta employees are currently scrambling to delete any and all criticism of their new board member, Dana White, CEO of UFC and famed wife-beater, according to a report from 404 Media. Oh, wait, sorry, that’s just internally. They’re stifling their own employees’ criticisms of company decisions that directly affect them, but according to Zuck the company will now be obliterating their content moderation team and changing the rules to allow users to say pretty much whatever they’d like, including but not limited to saying that gay and trans people are mentally ill and should be barred from certain parts of our society, that Chinese people are responsible for COVID, and that women are property. Cool, cool cool. I love it when a company has to put out a public notice announcing that it’s officially and specifically okay now to say “You’re gay because you’re brain damaged” or “I can own a woman.” This is fun.
Okay, let’s take a moment to do some really basic fact checking that the mainstream media is not doing. “Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is moving moderators from California to Texas to combat concerns about bias and censorship,” announced Business Insider. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say a major reason for this move is that Texas has fewer protections for workers and allows corporations to pay less in taxes than California. Prove me wrong!
But I mean, sure, there’s an argument that Zuck is doing this to “combat concerns about bias and censorship,” in that this move is also being done in part to allay the concerns of one specific person by the name of Donald Trump, probably because Donald Trump literally said that when he retook office he would literally put Mark Zuckerberg in prison for life for being mean to him.
Because regardless of what conservatives may think, they were not being unfairly moderated on Facebook or other social media sites prior to this moment. They WERE being “censored” more often than liberals, but it was, in fact, fair: researchers have shown pretty conclusively that the rightwing is far more likely to share misinformation on social media. For instance, as recently as three months ago, researchers at Oxford published a paper in Nature in which they analyzed 9,000 posts on Xitter during the 2020 election and found that “Although users estimated to be pro-Trump/conservative were indeed substantially more likely to be suspended than those estimated to be pro-Biden/liberal, users who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots. We find similar associations between stated or inferred conservatism and low-quality news sharing (on the basis of both expert and politically balanced layperson ratings) in 7 other datasets of sharing from Twitter, Facebook and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 and including data from 16 different countries. Thus, even under politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, political asymmetries in enforcement should be expected. Political imbalance in enforcement need not imply bias on the part of social media companies implementing anti-misinformation policies.”
Mark Zuckerman may be a sniveling, misogynistic, spineless, colonizing, friendless loser, but he isn’t misinformed on this. I guarantee that he knows that conservatives spread more misinformation. It’s just that he doesn’t care, because his primary goals right now are 1.) not ending up in front of a MAGA firing squad and 2.) making even more money, despite the fact that he could stop making money right now, spend $500 million every single day of the year and still have $80 million left by Christmas. You know, for stocking stuffers.
You may be left wondering what the big deal is. After all, YOU are so smart and savvy and cool that you haven’t used a Meta product since Facebook opened its doors to people who didn’t even have an official university email address. Allow me to take you back to 2017, when security forces in Myanmar conducted a genocide, butchering the Rohingya ethnic minority, resulting in thousands raped, tens of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes to become refugees.
How did this atrocity come to be? Well, over the years since, experts have pinpointed several factors. One of them was the Myanmar government’s use of Facebook to spread hate speech against the Rohingya, utilizing dozens of seemingly unrelated pages, including some that supposedly focused on celebrity gossip, to spread the idea that the ethnic minority posed an existential threat to Burmese values and “racial purity” by over breeding and spreading Islam. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same genocidal language employed by Donald Trump’s administration as well as the current Israeli government in their ongoing genocide in Gaza.
This campaign was successful in part because the people of Myanmar only got decent internet access relatively recently, and with no trustworthy local news sources online, Facebook became their default internet–a place to connect with others, get breaking news alerts, and form opinions. As this detailed report from Amnesty International shows, employees at the company knew that this was a possible result of their prioritization of profit over moderation. When a viral anti-Muslim Facebook post led directly to deadly violence in Myanmar in 2014, Facebook responded by releasing a cutesy sticker pack and encouraged users to leave those on hate speech to show they disagreed with it. Instead, the Facebook algorithm assumed the happy stickers were positive engagement on the hate speech in question, and then boosted it to more people accordingly. Great job, guys.
Facebook’s utter ineptitude and actual complicity in this genocide became so well-documented that in 2018 they admitted that they were at fault, and Rohingya refugees sued the company in $150 billion in 2021.
That’s just one example, and incredibly, it’s not the only one. In 2022, Meta was also the target of a $1.6 billion lawsuit in Kenya’s High Court for amplifying hate speech during Ethiopia’s Tigray War. Not “allowing hate speech to exist” on Facebook, but for actively amplifying it, leading to, yes, even more ethnic cleansing.
If I had a nickel for every time Facebook contributed to an ethnic cleansing, I’d be well on my way to being able to afford a share of Facebook stock. I was going to make the “I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice” joke but it’s actually probably happened more: Facebook may have played a vital role in the anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka in 2018, and in the ongoing persecution of the Uyghurs in China. Wikipedia had to set up an entire separate page for “Facebook content management controversies,” which includes a subheading simply titled “War Crimes.” Imagine setting up a website to literally rate the hotness of female students and twenty years later you have a Wiki section dedicated to war crimes. Great job Zuck. You make me wish hell was a real thing.
This is why it’s actually a really bad sign that Zuck has now proudly rolled back the changes he instituted in the past ten years, which were at least an effort to stop the negative real world consequences of the rampant misinformation on the platform. As Wired notes, “Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy previously opened by noting that hateful speech may “promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been present in the policy since 2019, has been removed from the updated version released Tuesday.”
So sure, go ahead and delete your Meta accounts. That would be Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and Threads, for most people. But remember that people in other places aren’t so lucky to have that luxury, thanks to our technocratic overlords replacing the free internet with basically four websites you switch between, something that we GenX/elder Millennials should have seen coming since AOL was a thing. Mark Zuckerberg’s sniveling capitulation to Donald Trump is likely to have far-reaching consequences. Keep an eye on that “War Crimes” subheading.
Anyway, follow me on Bluesky, and now, uh, Pixelfed I guess? I don’t know, whatever.
