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I noted yesterday how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is rushing to jump on the Trump tech bandwagon. He signaled this again when he announced that Meta is getting out of the content moderation business and adopting Musk-Era Twitter’s “community notes” model. He further added that he would relocate the remaining content moderation operations to Texas where people are less biased — yes, he really said that.
I want to make a broader point. The issue here is that one of the richest men in the world and one of the very most powerful has made himself and his vastly powerful tech platforms appendages of the Trump political machine and dedicated himself to flowing money to the Trump family directly. But let’s not get too upset about his “content moderation” decisions. The content moderation pivot is an example of the former decision, a carefully timed signal to curry favor. But it’s not some big disaster. The whole existence of it was just a ploy to get out from under his company’s last PR disaster back in 2017 and 2018. And on a more specific level we should be agnostic at best about whether Meta does “content moderation” at all. We should always have been highly skeptical of any corporate-backed effort at scale to determine what is and isn’t accurate information. This isn’t a new thought on my part. It goes back to what I was saying in 2018 and before.