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?

From TPM Reader JB …

Trump has promised to do a bunch of things on day 1. Why aren’t Democrats taking the worst of them and raising the cost of doing them? It is political malpractice. The easiest would be to say that Trump is going to pardon the cop killers of January 6. No deep thinking, no multi clause sentences,  no saying there was or wasn’t an insurrection, just that he is going to pardon the violent cop killers of January 6. Over and over. Let him split hairs. He can deny it. Then direct the press to the officers themselves.  That mob killed Capitol Hill police. Tell the press to go talk to the Capitol Hill police who were there on January 6. Then say he is anti-police. He is with the criminals. Over and over.

Next: Tulsi Gabbard loves Syrian dictators who gas their own people. This is who is going to keep us safe?

We don’t have to win everything, we just need to push back where he is soft. He is flooding the zone. We can do the same. Cop killers and dictators who gas people…those are his kind of people.

The group is one big eye roll.

Through the spiked Washington Post endorsement editorial to the recent spiked editorial cartoon, it’s been difficult to get a precise read on Jeff Bezos’s cozying up to Donald Trump. As I wrote back in late October, there are very rational reasons for Bezos to want to avoid being on Trump’s shit list. Above all else, Trump isn’t nice. Amazon is a phantasmagoria of anti-trust problems. Trump wouldn’t need to break a lot of norms to sic the Justice Department on it. Amazon is also a major, major federal contractor. Same applies there. There’s no right to government contracts. Then there’s something that doesn’t get discussed much. SpaceX now has a dominant hold on satellite deployment and owns and controls like half the operating satellites in near-Earth orbit. But Bezos’s BlueOrigin isn’t quite an also ran. It still has a shot at being a competitor to SpaceX and Bezos reportedly now focuses most of his energy there. He at least needs Trump’s friendship to have a shot at that.

In that context came news last night that Amazon has agreed to underwrite and license a documentary about the life of past and future First Lady Melania Trump.