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You’ve likely seen that Mark Zuckerberg, newly re-branded as Donald Trump’s fluffy lap monkey, has announced that Facebook and Meta’s other properties are getting out of the content moderation business. They’ll move in the direction of “community notes,” semi-functional community moderation which Elon Musk pioneered at Twitter. What interested me much more was the Axios run-down of the news: “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are of one mind. The most powerful global information platforms should be governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.”
Who are we kidding here?
I’ve always been wary of the whole concept of “misinformation” in the context of corporate platform moderation. Not against precisely, but highly skeptical that you can actually come to such open and shut definitions at scale. But it’s all basically an impossible skein to untangle because of the unavoidable scourge of the platform monopolies themselves. These are private companies, not any kind of actual public square. Let them do whatever they want. Don’t do them the favor of granting the premise that their advertising and data platform is a public good. And yet the freedom to spin up untrammeled monopolies makes the conceit half true. There’s simply no extracting a “free speech” from these engines since they’re algorithms all the way down.
But again, who are we kidding here?
The driver of all of this is Elon Musk. There’s no “free speech” on Twitter. We’ve seen with predictable frequency that his version of “free speech” is one in which those who get on Musk’s bad side routinely get their accounts suspended, shadow-banned and all the rest. What Musk has created is no more than a crude parody version of what right-wingers always claimed the old system was — self-interested bosses crudely putting their thumbs on the scale to advance their political goals. There’s some real argument to a genuine hands-off approach. But Musk-rules have rapidly degenerated into what was always predictable: rule by the boss. Free speech and amplification … if you agree with Elon Musk. The fact that the Axios crowd can’t say this openly just shows the DC corruption they’ve always been part of.
We see predictable signs of this everywhere as billionairedom collectively assumes the position for the incoming president. That Melania Trump documentary? Turns out Amazon paid not for ownership but simply licensing, a whopping $40 million. Yes, $40 million straight into the Trump family’s pocket. (Really, what do you think the expenses for this charade amount to?) And there was a bidding war to get on board. Disney and Paramount got outbid by Amazon. Sad! They lined up for their chance to hose Trump down in cash, in a kind of licensing wet t-shirt contest.
One thing I’ve been entertained by for years is that the far-right co-optation of social media has followed almost exactly the arc conventional, now-legacy media took over 30 to 40 years. Move fast and break yourself, you might say.
Start with a longterm campaign of tendentious bias claims, aggressively play the refs and over time build in a playing field reliably tilted to the right. The funny thing is that the tech billionaires seemed totally oblivious to the fact that this was precisely the game plan, exactly the progression the same folks pulled with old media. Now they don’t care. But for several years they took the whole thing at face value. Only it went an order of magnitude faster.
I can’t get terribly worked up about this. I’m not rending garments. It provides a refreshing clarity. The billionaires are all lined up on one side, on the side of billionairedom, begging for the right to throw money at the decadent final years’ potentate. It’s the powerful versus everyone who doesn’t want to lick the boot of power. I can understand that. It’s a refreshing clarity.