In the wake of Meta Platforms ending its fact-checking program in the United States, one aspect of the changes in Meta’s social media network went underrepresented in some spheres of the internet, ours included.
Meta is making it easier for derogatory remarks to be made and thrive on its platforms.
The Intercept reported on January 9 that training materials it obtained showed there was going to be more freedom to “post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities” following changes to how it moderates speech on its platforms.
While its automatic moderation (and likely manned moderation) systems will still seek out illegal or high-severity content deserving weeding out, you can now reliably “insult” people at your leisure.
Such permissible statements can — and likely will — include falsehoods, but since the US won’t have a fact-checking program anymore, the following statements are said to be alright by Zuckerberg standards:
- “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
- “Gays are freaks.”
- “Look at that tranny (beneath the photo of a 17-year-old girl).”
Zuckerberg, on Threads, has said the changes to policy are supposed to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.”
Meta says its new rules will “allow more speech by lifting restrictions,” but it will also foster hatred against specific subsets of society at large.
For lack of a better way of contextualizing it, this is basically a techbro CEO allowing hate to foster so he can enrich himself through engagement bucks. Enough to afford another $900,000 watch, to be sure.
Since, as mentioned in passing, he’s allowing this muck to fester and grow in his spaces, I reckon it should be safe to say that “CEOs like Zuckerberg are trash,” even if CEOs, contemptible as some of them are, aren’t exactly a race or special interest group and Mark Zuckerberg literally isn’t a piece of trash.
During a three-hour Joe Rogan podcast, Zuckerberg justified the end of fact-checking and the relaxing of restricted speech as a means of “getting back to our original mission of giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
This harkens back to the 2014 mission of Meta to “Connect the World” but in this case, the world he’s trying to connect is being glued together by the muck he’s propagating. This rejiggered facsimile of a world he’s trying to build is one where he’s out on top, everyone else’s wellbeing be damned.
“Techbro CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg are reality-destroying pieces of trash” is not the nicest way to say how you feel. But it is how I feel, and apparently, that’s good enough for Zuck. – Rappler.com
