Mark Zuckerberg Is Cozying Up to the Right. The Reason Why Is Gross.
Reading Time: 5 minutesWhat the Hell Is Going On With Meta Right Now?, Zuck is in his villain era—and there’s a cold-blooded reason for it., Mark Zuckerberg: The real reason why Meta is so chaotic right now.
Just in case you ever believed that Mark Zuckerberg came to understand the gravity of his role as the head of a Big Tech megaconglomerate whose apps serve as essential communication infrastructure for almost half of the world, he’s now doing everything he can to disabuse you of that generous notion.
It’s not just his public declarations that he’s ‘done apologizing,’ disparagement of the human creations he steals on the regular to train his highly valued A.I. apps, photos of gold chains and workout regimens, odes to Caesar and the Roman plunder of Carthage, and avowed praise of Donald Trump’s ‘spirit‘ post-assassination attempt (you know, the same Donald Trump who was once kicked off Facebook after inciting an attempted coup). It’s also something about the way he and his lieutenants have been running things at every major app that operates under the Big Tech megaconglomerate known as Meta—Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Meta AI.
In a year when news publishers and public agencies have explained that Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have consistently labeled links and posts from legitimate outlets as spam and erroneously restricted their accounts, Threads is now apparently blocking links to stories about Trump’s very newsworthy pro-Hitler comments—and not just restricting accounts who share such articles, but also locking other accounts that even mention the fact that journalists are being digitally punished for sharing news.
Whether or not those blocks were accidental, as Meta spokespeople claim, this one certainly wasn’t, and is all the stranger for that: On Monday, Threads and Instagram booted the respective accounts of the famed celebrity flight tracker that had already been banned from Twitter in late 2022. (His Facebook account will soon say bye-bye as well, Meta’s communications director has guaranteed.) As with Twitter, Meta appears to have justified the suspensions on specious grounds, citing the accounts as exposing ‘private information‘ even though they merely repost already-public information made available by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Speaking of deliberate suppression, Meta’s hostility toward the spread of news and ‘political’ content on its apps—and the persistent, widespread use of those apps for political organizing, in spite of that stance—has been discussed quite a bit this election cycle. But the bosses’ incoherent, inconsistent devotion to this stance has escalated to the point that the mere use of words like vote will have your posts buried by the algorithm in a drastic manner.
And yes, incoherent and inconsistent are the correct adjectives here, in light of a recent report from the Intercept that uncovered how Meta’s Israel policy chief, Jordana Cutler, deliberately pushed for the censorship of pro-Palestine student groups on Instagram by erroneously framing those groups as blacklisted organizations. Meta denies this and referred to the reporting as ‘dangerous and irresponsible.’ Yet it’s certainly consistent with past revelations—from the Facebook Papers and other leaked documents—that Meta executives consistently declined to suspend India-based accounts that violated its policies over incitement to violence and hate speech. They also bowed to pressure from the Indian government to remove posts and accounts that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing administration didn’t care for.
Meanwhile, other disinformation tends to run freely, even during times of heightened crisis and emergency. For instance, A.I.-generated images, videos, and conspiracy posts were ubiquitous on social media in the respective aftermaths of hurricanes Helene and Milton, even as the news organizations and public agencies trying to debunk those dangerous falsehoods found themselves algorithmically stymied.
Meta certainly wasn’t attempting to pick up the slack, considering how much it has rolled back former content-moderation policies, and continued to lay off people working on information verification and oversight. Even Zuck admitted to congressional Republicans that he regrets taking down misinformation around COVID-19 (though he certainly didn’t censor that content all too effectively, as anyone who came across the Plandemic conspiracy movie can testify).
Even while he deprioritizes Meta’s internal election safety efforts, stops funding broader election security initiatives under pressure from the GOP, and hops on personal phone calls with Trump, he isn’t actually reassuring those Republicans, who keep sending him stern letters and accusing him of rigging the system against Trump.
Nevertheless, if truth is no longer a priority for Meta, A.I. certainly is. The skyrocketing energy needs for operating all those data centers and network-training operations have incentivized the company to restart once shuttered coal plants and drastically ramp up its overall electricity consumption. Hence it all but backtracking on its emissions reductions and climate change mitigation goals, just so users can belch out more fake, dangerously misleading images and videos.
It’s certainly a lot to take in, and there’s been no shortage of musing over what’s been driving the tack Zuckerberg’s been taking against any sort of accountability to maintaining a fair, workable social media ecosystem (at least, no accountability to anybody besides Republicans). Is he still smarting after nearly a decade of nonstop scandal, from Russian psy-ops to Cambridge Analytica to the Facebook Papers to the inaction on Trump’s ‘looting and shooting’ rhetoric to Facebook’s role in enabling genocidal violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar? Is he just pissed off in general that so many users, whether fairly or unfairly, blame him for the erosion, among the masses, of a common perception of truth and reality? Is he disgusted with the public for not sharing his clearly misguided view that the metaverse is the future? Is he, like so many other CEOs in tech and media, simply taking after the examples of petulant, entitled leadership modeled by Elon Musk? Did the ‘world-class beef‘ farmed on his Hawaii ranch do something to his personality?
Frankly, I think it all points to something much more simple. Yes, all those past scandals undeniably annoyed Zuckerberg and led him to decide that it’s easier to just not deal with issues of serious import than to do so. But these were PR hullaballoos that, all in all, he and his business weathered fairly easily. The messes he’s had to deal with in recent years, however, are far more serious and could lead to real, substantial, visible changes to his company—notably, of the kind that he himself did not instigate.
The Republican furor at Zuck these days is at such a pitch that Trump even threatened to imprison the executive for life, and everyone knows at this point that is not a threat to take lightly should the man regain power. The near-universal anger at Zuckerberg over Facebook and Instagram’s harms to teenagers have subjected Meta to myriad lawsuits, at both the civil and governmental level, that could change everything about the way those apps operate, especially as pertains to those addictive algorithms that keep users plugged in—in large part by knowingly preying on their most violent, bigoted, or suicidal impulses.
Over in the European Union, the strict tech regulations applying throughout the 27-nation bloc have led to repeated fines over privacy and antitrust violations, as well as restrictions on data-gathering that are holding back Meta’s large-scale A.I. rollout across the Atlantic (which is especially problematic for Meta now that those A.I. projects are earning the type of investments it used to delegate to the metaverse). Back in the U.S., Meta is attempting to hold off accountability rulings from the Federal Trade Commission by fighting a lawsuit that questions the very constitutionality of the agency altogether, placing it in the league of fellow Big Tech giants, including Amazon and SpaceX and the major cryptocurrency firms, that have similarly questioned the constitutional legitimacy of other regulatory agencies.
Coupled with Meta’s industry-leading governmental lobbying efforts, it seems pretty clear what Zuckerberg is aiming for: a firm blockade against anyone who might try to tell him what to do. Think about it. If you’ve been the ruler of a world-dominating social media apparatus for nearly 20 years now, are you going to cave so freely when governments finally get it together and try to tell you how to better run things? With antitrust in vogue on a global scale, and in the face of a recharged, newly aggressive regulatory apparatus under the current Democratic president, Joe Biden, you don’t want to find yourself in a position where you can lose even a speck of the sheer power and autonomy you’ve garnered for yourself over the years. So why not do everything you can to appease the folks on the other side of the aisle?
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/10/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-chaos-explained.html
Ref: slate
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