Meta's Shift: Zuckerberg Announces Major Policy Changes Amid Political Landscape Transformation

Mark Zuckerberg's Fact-Checking Announcement Is Worse Than You Think

Meta's return to political content, looser moderation rules, and Trump-friendly policies look a lot like Musk's vision for X. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On Tuesday -- the fourth anniversary of the day Meta implemented its two-year suspension on then-President Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts following the 2021 Capitol insurrection -- Mark Zuckerberg posted a five-minute vertical video in which he heralded a significant vibe shift on those very platforms. The curly-haired, gold-chained Meta CEO decried "governments and legacy media" that, he claimed, "pushed to censor more and more" for "clearly political" reasons. Zuckerberg then claimed that Meta would go back to its "roots" and embrace the "cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech" supposedly ushered in by Trump's reelection. Zuckerberg summed up the changes, soon to roll out across the United States, with six points in all: The video was attached to a press release written by Joel Kaplan, who has long helped push Facebook policy in a Republican-friendly direction and was recently promoted to the company's chief global affairs officer. Kaplan wrote that Community Notes would be "less obtrusive" than Meta's current content labels and that the company would mostly stop enforcing punishments against posts and users that break the platforms' rules. He added that "we think one to two out of every 10" of Meta's content removals in December "may have been mistakes" (quite a bit of hedging there!) and noted that the company has started using A.I. to "provide a second opinion on some content before we take enforcement actions." Of course, Zuckerberg's Muskian turn seems to be a direct signal to Trump. As CNN Business reported, "Meta gave Trump's team an advanced heads up that the moderation policy change was coming." Just minutes after the release went public, Kaplan appeared on Fox & Friends to further promote the message. Although Kaplan denied that Meta would be taking any sort of "Twitter Files"-style probe into its government relations, he did offer plenty of other red meat for Trump's circle by naming disputes around "trans issues" as one topic that would be less moderated, emphasizing that parents will have more control over teenagers' accounts and acknowledging that Meta had recently talked to the Trump White House's incoming "crypto and A.I. czar," Musk pal David Sacks. The response to Zuckerberg's announcement has been overwhelming. Meta's now-former fact-checking partners disputed Zuck's characterization of their work (and clarified, accurately, that they never had the power to remove any posts). Civil rights groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations pointed out the hypocrisy of Meta's new "pro-speech" stance in light of the documented suppression of Facebook and Instagram's Palestinian users. And free speech advocates, including Knight First Amendment Institute research director Katherine Glenn Bass, called the announcements "an obvious effort to signal political allegiance." Alexios Mantzarlis, who founded the fact-checking initiative that came under Meta leadership's fire, drew a connection between Musk and Zuck in a bristling statement that read, in part: "Mark Zuckerberg had eight years' worth of data to prove his belief that Meta's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program was biased. Instead of sharing any hard evidence, however, he chose to cosplay like Elon Musk and promise free expression for all." No matter how justified, all these complaints will dissipate in the wind as Zuckerberg doubles down. On Monday, the CEO declared that UFC President Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump's, would be joining Meta's board of directors alongside Ferrari chairman John Elkann and former Microsoft executive Charlie Songhurst. 404 Media reported soon after that when Meta employees internally criticized White's hire -- citing his record of domestic violence -- their comments were deleted. So much for "once again prioritizing speech." The full text of the Monday announcement also featured some significant tells. For one, the now-13-member board, which also features Trump adviser Marc Andreessen and Bush family loyalist Robert Kimmitt, will support Meta's pursuit of "massive opportunities ahead in AI, wearables, and the future of social media." That the list of priorities is ordered that way is perhaps not a coincidence, in light of Zuckerberg's gargantuan A.I. investments and his subsequent emphasis on Songhurst's biography, which points to his history of advising Meta on A.I. It's also likely not a coincidence that this A.I.-focused news dropped right after a weekend of fraught controversies for Meta, especially pertaining to A.I. After the Financial Times reported on Dec. 27 that Meta was "rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook," users began seeking out these profiles and stumbled across some older A.I.-powered "characters," which were originally tested in 2023 and mostly stopped posting 10 months ago, as 404 Media reported. (The company also did not allow users to block them, which a spokesperson blamed on a technical error.) The company soon got to scrubbing the bizarre test profiles, but trouble flared up again when, according to a Reddit post, one Instagrammer who'd used Meta AI to edit some of his selfies began to see posts on his feed with his own face displayed on them, as part of Meta AI's promotional efforts for its image-generation software. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg himself had nothing to say about any of these events. He seems to have truly meant it when, on the Acquired podcast last year, he proclaimed that he's "done apologizing" for, well, just about anything -- not only for all the A.I. messes, but for his relentless Trump courtship, which had landed him in trouble in the past. In a 2022 Wired profile of Kaplan, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr -- now in line to run the entire agency under Trump 2.0 -- noted that bipartisan anger at Facebook meant that Zuck and Co. had "lost all their friends in Washington." The simultaneous moves to double down on A.I. while embracing Trump-friendly institutions and figures are unmistakable proof Zuckerberg is doing everything he can to gain new friends in MAGA-led Washington, no matter how risible they may be. And Zuck's ever-expansive A.I. ambitions could use some more friends in this incoming administration -- namely ones who won't follow the Biden government's lead in blocking Meta from building A.I. data centers in habitats that are home to rare bee species. Accelerationist friends like Andreessen and Sacks will help there, as will Kaplan. Heck, Zuck isn't even taking off the Meta Ray-Bans in his profile picture, even in light of new revelations that the New Orleans driver who killed 14 people on Bourbon Street planned his deadly attack using Meta's smart glasses. That's certainly one way to never say you're sorry.

Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Be Elon Musk

Yesterday morning, donning his new signature fit -- gold chain, oversize T-shirt, surfer hair -- Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social-media platforms are getting a makeover. His aggrievement was palpable: For years, Zuckerberg said, "governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more." No longer. Meta is abolishing its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the U.S.; loosening its content filters; and bringing political content back to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression," Meta's chief executive declared. In the announcement, Zuckerberg identified "the recent elections," in which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans claimed both houses of Congress, as a "cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech." He said Meta will take direct inspiration from X's "Community Notes" feature, which allows users to annotate posts -- and surfaces the annotations based on how other users rate them -- rather than granting professional fact-checkers authority to remove or label posts. Among the notable changes is permitting users to describe gay and transgender people as having "mental illness." The dog-whistling around legacy media, censorship, and free-speech sounded uncannily like one of Zuckerberg's greatest rivals: Elon Musk, the world's richest person and a defender of the most noxious speech -- at least when he agrees with it. Over the past several years, Musk has become a far-right icon, railing against major publications and liberal politicians for what he deems a "censorship government-industrial complex." After buying Twitter, he renamed it X and has turned the platform into a bastion for hate speech, personally spread misinformation, and become a Trump confidante and trusted adviser. Zuckerberg has been feuding with Musk for years over their respective social-media dominance and masculinity -- the pair even publicly challenged each other to a cage match in 2023. This week's policy changes might be understood as another throwdown between the two men. Although Facebook and Instagram are both considerably more popular than X -- not to mention extremely profitable -- they lack the political relevance that Musk has cultivated on his platform. That asset has helped bring Trump back for occasional posting there (he is still much more active on his own platform, Truth Social) and, more important, has put X and its owner in favorable positions ahead of Trump's ascension to the presidency. Musk will even co-lead a new federal commission advising his administration. Their close relationship will likely benefit Musk's AI, space, and satellite companies, too. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has not been viewed favorably by Trump or his allies: The president-elect has stated that Zuckerberg steered Facebook against him during the 2020 election, and threatened to put the Meta CEO in jail for "the rest of his life," while Republicans such as Ohio Representative Jim Jordan have complained about alleged censorship on the platform. Currying favor with the right wing, as Musk has done so successfully, may well be mission critical for Meta, which is currently facing an antitrust suit from the Federal Trade Commission that it would surely rather settle. These shifts are occurring against a longer transformation for the company and its chief executive. Zuckerberg has gone from a deferential, awkward, almost robotic nerd to a flashy mixed-martial-arts enthusiast who posts photos of his fights and has public beef with other tech executives. Meta, after years of waning influence, has been attempting a cultural and technological revival as well -- pivoting hard toward generative AI by widely promoting its flagship Llama models and launching its own X competitor, Threads. These personal and corporate changes are one and the same: Zuckerberg has recently shared a photo of him reading his infant a picture book titled Llama; posted AI-enhanced videos of himself sporting his new martial-arts physique, leg-pressing gold chains or dressed as a Roman centurion; and showcased an AI-generated illustration of himself in a boy band. Also this week, the company announced that Dana White, the CEO and president of UFC (and a notable Trump backer), joined Meta's board of directors. The blog post outlining Meta's new "more speech" policies was written by Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist at Meta who just replaced the company's long-standing head of global policy, who was considered center-left. Jordan, the once adversarial congressperson, said he is pleased with Meta's new approach to content moderation and will meet with Zuckerberg in the coming weeks. But for all the effort and bravado, Zuckerberg and Meta have been consistently outdone by Musk. The latter already overhauled X into a "free speech" haven for the right. If Meta is responding to the recent election by currying favor with the incoming Trump administration, Musk helped bring Republicans victory and will advise that administration. Musk helped get OpenAI off the ground, and his newer and smaller AI company, xAI, rapidly developed a model, Grok, that has matched and by some metrics surpassed Meta's own. Zuckerberg might boast about Meta's AI infrastructure, but xAI partnered with Nvidia to build the world's largest AI supercomputer in a shockingly fast 122 days. Musk has touted Grok as fulfilling the need for an anti-"woke" AI -- the software has been shown to readily sexualize female celebrities and illustrate racist caricatures. It's easy to imagine Meta lowering its AI guardrails next in a bid to better emulate Musk's own offensive showboating. Even if he catches up, Zuckerberg still lacks the confidence of his rival. He presents as both rehearsed and ostentatious; he announced the end of independent fact-checking while wearing a $900,000 watch. Musk is many things, but he is not a poser: His speech is rambling, off-the-cuff, and perceived as visionary by his followers and much of Silicon Valley. He shows up to Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and talks business while streaming video games. "This is cool," Musk wrote of Meta's "free speech" pivot, on X, as if commending a younger sibling. Becoming a martial-arts enthusiast, pivoting to AI, bringing Republicans into Meta's leadership, decrying "legacy media" and "censorship," and permitting homophobia are Zuckerberg's attempts at defiance and renewal. But in no respect is he leading the conversation -- rather than upending the technological landscape with the "metaverse," he is following his competitors in both AI and social media. He may not be capitulating to the Democratic establishment, as he believes his company did in the past, but he is still capitulating to the establishment. It's just that this time, he is apologizing to the ascendant far-right. "They've come a long way," the president-elect said of Meta's changes at a press conference yesterday. (Did he think the changes were made in response to threats he had made toward Zuckerberg in the past? "Probably," Trump responded.) It is worth recalling that Facebook did not strengthen its approach to content moderation and limit political content, changes that Zuckerberg now says amount to "censorship," just because a few Democratic senators asked. Russian-interference campaigns, various domestic far-right militias, and all manner of misinformation were rampant on the platform for years, wreaking havoc on multiple presidential-election cycles. Facebook exposed users' private data, was used to plan the Capitol insurrection in the U.S., and fueled ethnic genocide abroad. The platform, prior to those policy changes, was viewed by some as a legitimate threat to democracy; "we have made a lot of mistakes," Zuckerberg told Congress in 2018. He has had a change of heart -- yesterday, Zuckerberg again promised to make "fewer mistakes," this time referencing the supposed policing of conservative speech. For one of Silicon Valley's self-appointed kings, perhaps abetting the unraveling of democracy and civil society is, in the end, nothing to apologize for.

Column | Meta gives Trump and his supporters a heart emoji

Eye always on the bottom line, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg goes to great lengths not to be yelled at. Last week, Instagram users began to notice unusual accounts that had been sitting quietly on the platform for several months. Created by the company, the accounts pretended to be real people, sharing real photos and commentary -- but they weren't. They had been generated by artificial intelligence and engaged with other accounts using an AI conversational engine. There was a quick backlash, particularly targeting an account that presented itself as a vocal member of a minority community. The AI-generated accounts were shuttered. But it was easy to see the appeal to Instagram and its parent company, Meta. What if the social media platform could be a place featuring a diverse array of voices and imagery, but without any of the cumbersome opinions and emotions and lies and propaganda that real humans brought to the table? All of the pleasant surreality offered by the platform's current influencers with none of the possible scandals. Skip to end of carousel Sign up for the How to Read This Chart newsletter Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more. End of carousel For years now, it's people who have been Meta's biggest frustration. Instagram and Facebook have been widely adopted in the United States; 2024 Pew Research Center analysis determined that 47 and 68 percent of American adults use the platforms respectively. That has meant that a lot of people have been offering thoughts about what the platforms should be doing. It has also meant that Meta, in the business of increasing shareholder value, has found itself responding to the most insistent of those voices. Those complaints have often centered on politics. Facebook in particular was a central conduit for news stories for years, meaning that it offered millions of Americans a lens into the political discussion. In early 2016, that spurred criticism that the platform was removing conservative news outlets from its trending topics; it first automated the system and then, in 2018, killed trending topics entirely. When news broke that Russian actors had used Facebook and Twitter in an (ineffective) effort to influence public opinion during (and after) the 2016 presidential election, it complicated already energetic calls to reduce negative and abusive behavior on the platforms. New moderation controls against abuse and misinformation were implemented -- quickly triggering complaints from the political right that it was being unfairly targeted. (Research suggests that conservatives are more likely to share and believe misinformation, a contributor to perceptions of imbalanced moderation.) President Donald Trump seized on the idea, looping it into his broader rhetoric about being victimized by powerful actors scared of the right's power. But there's no evidence that the right was negatively affected by Meta's moderation. In fact, a Wall Street Journal article in 2020 revealed that the implementation of Facebook's moderation policy worked to the benefit of right-leaning sites and at the expense of left-leaning ones. Analysis of Facebook using the tool Crowdtangle repeatedly showed that right-wing sites were often the most popular content on the platform. Meta eventually killed off Crowdtangle and aimed to scale back its political content broadly, clearly in part because of ongoing criticism from Trump and his allies. The 2020 election and the overlapping coronavirus pandemic created new moderation headaches, ones that offered both actual and perceived examples of overreach and that fostered a specious claim that federal efforts to encourage vaccination amounted to a censorship effort. Throughout the 2024 election, political content was muted across both Instagram and its X competitor, Threads. Then Trump won. So, four years to the day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Trump would be removed from Facebook out of concern that he would stoke political violence akin to the riot at the Capitol, Zuckerberg made a new announcement Tuesday: Meta was overhauling its moderation efforts in an explicit nod to Trump's political revival. "The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech," Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Meta's website. "After Trump first got elected in 2016," he added a bit later, "the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S." That system, he said, would be replaced with a community-moderation system akin to the one used at X. He also announced that efforts to limit abuse would be scaled back, with the platforms planning to "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse." This line of argument will be familiar to those tracking assessments of the 2024 election results, particularly the dubious "America rejected wokeism" argument. It nods both to Trump's insistence that his narrow victory was a significant marker and to the right's long-standing and broadly baseless criticisms of fact-checkers. "We're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas as we work to promote free expression," Zuckerberg said in the statement. "I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams." That's about as explicit a manifestation of what's at play as you'll get: The people to whom he's seeking to appeal view California-based moderation as hopelessly biased but Texas-based moderation as not similarly tainted. The people at whom the changes are targeted think that fact-checking is biased, so it gets chucked out the window. There are two likely reasons that Meta is making this shift at this time, reasons that overlap. First, the company hopes to reinforce its hospitality to the political right and supporters of Donald Trump. Second, it hopes to curry favor with Trump himself, as the former president prepares to return to power and implement an often explicitly favoritism-based national policy. Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush adviser tapped to serve in a senior role at Meta last week, appeared on cable news Tuesday morning to talk about the changes -- on Fox News, naturally. "There's ... no question that there has been a change over the last four years," Kaplan said in response to a question on the channel's "Fox & Friends" program. "We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship. And we've got a real opportunity now. We've got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference." Here, again, we see an indefensible sop to Trumpian rhetoric. The new president is not a "big defender of free expression." He has threatened to sue or sued multiple news outlets for reports with which he disagreed. He has nominated an FBI director who has pledged to target critical media outlets. Multiple reports from Trump's first presidency indicated his interest in using force against peaceful protests. But this is how Trump -- and his top adviser, X owner Elon Musk -- present themselves. It's how his base views itself. So it's what Meta tells Fox News it is responding to. The Fox News hosts understood exactly what Meta was doing, by the way. "What you've got to do is reestablish trust," host Brian Kilmeade told Kaplan. He alluded to a conspiracy theory that Zuckerberg had attempted to shift the 2020 election results in Joe Biden's favor, suggesting that this falsehood (one shared frequently on Fox News itself) contributed to the distrust. A first step, Kilmeade said, was "making this announcement here." (He also noted that Meta has added to its board, tapping Ultimate Fighting Championship chairman and Trump ally Dana White to help oversee the company.) In his comments, Zuckerberg offered a hint of what the company seeks from the Trump administration. "Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down," he explained. "China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government." He suggested that the Biden administration's interest in combating coronavirus misinformation made this task harder, "but now" -- that is, with Trump's ascent -- "we have an opportunity to restore free expression, and I'm excited to take it." Paying homage to a president who demands homage. Assuring Trump supporters that the platforms will let them post whatever they want. (In Pew's analysis, Facebook was the only major platform used more by Republicans than by Democrats.) And most of all, telling the people who are currently screaming the loudest that they are being heard and their concerns addressed. At least until someone else starts screaming louder -- or until all of those pesky humans can simply be replaced with pliant, diverse robots.

Nick Clegg's departure signals a new political era at Meta

Centrist and globalist Clegg is being replaced by a conservative champion ahead of Trump's second term Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Happy New Year! May dry January leave us all with fewer headaches. Today in TechScape: Meta promotes a Trumpian bulldog, TikTok faces mounting problems that aren't a ban, Meta faces backlash against its approach to AI and Elon Musk meddles abroad. Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, is now the former head of global affairs at Meta. He announced his resignation on Thursday after six years at the tech giant. He spent two years in the company's top policy job. In the announcement of his departure, Clegg wrote: "It truly has been an adventure of a lifetime! ... I hope I have played some role in seeking to bridge the very different worlds of tech and politics." He sold almost $19m worth of Meta shares during his time at the company, and he holds some $21m more. He may return to British politics, as the party he once led, the Liberal Democrats, won a record number of seats at the general election last year. You can see in Clegg's book titles how he was a politician of a less polarized era: Politics: Between the Extremes (and How To Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again). He made neither of his two shots on goal with these books: we live in extreme times, and Brexit was not stopped. Donald Trump is president of the US once again, and Meta's home country has shifted further to the right than when Trump first won the White House. The former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, so well-connected in Democratic circles, isn't even on Meta's board any longer. Clegg no longer fits the times. Clegg is a centrist, asserting in 2011 that his party's politics were that of the "radical centre". More than a dozen years later, political centrism has collapsed, unable to compete with the superlative appeal of the extremes, especially on Facebook. Clegg is also a globalist in a time of protectionism and nationalism, having managed the European Commission's trade negotiations with China and Russia in his earlier career. A global policy perspective makes financial sense at Meta, which boasts users in every cranny of the world. Such a viewpoint runs counter to "America First", which is a problem when Mark Zuckerberg is giving $1m to Trump's inaugural fund and showing off Meta Ray-Bans over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Replacing Clegg is his right-hand man, Joel Kaplan, hired in 2011. The promotion prefigures a more partisan era for Meta as a company and Facebook as a social network. Kaplan has championed conservative causes inside and outside Meta. Within, he has pushed Meta to partner with rightwing news websites on fact-checking; placed prominent Republicans in key roles; and advocated for Facebook not to restrict fake news, arguing such a crackdown would unfairly penalize conservatives. Without, he championed the nomination of the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to the US supreme court. When Kavanaugh was called to testify about allegations of sexual assault, Kaplan sat behind him, visible on the aisle seat of the Senate chamber. Social networks are inextricable from the politics of the past 15 years, so we can infer that they had a hand in centrism's demise. Kaplan has successfully argued for fewer algorithmic restrictions on Trump on Facebook. It's ironic that both Clegg's employer and top deputy helped tank his favored political philosophy. Clegg said he hoped to bridge the tech industry and politics. Kaplan, I predict, will take an approach that treats the two as one and the same. In 2025, they are. Having served in George W Bush's White House alongside Karl Rove, Kaplan is already enmeshed in Republican networks. He's enmeshed in conservative American politics. Whether you agree, his profile fits the tide of the moment: Elon Musk is unavoidable at Mar-a-Lago. Venture capitalists are taking on official White House roles and unofficial advisory positions. Silicon Valley's rightwingers are inseparable from San Francisco's politics. With Kaplan ascendant, Meta is well-positioned to take advantage of Trump's presidency. If TikTok evades a ban in the US - unlikely at this point, in my opinion - it faces another problem: a spate of lawsuits by state attorneys general over the video app's alleged use in child exploitation. My colleague Dara Kerr reports: TikTok has long been aware that its video livestream feature has been misused to harm children, according to newly revealed details in a lawsuit brought against the social media company by the state of Utah. Those harms include child sexual exploitation and what Utah calls "an open-door policy allowing predators and criminals to exploit users". The state's attorney general says TikTok conducted an internal investigation in which it discovered adults paid teens to "strip, pose, and dance provocatively" using its livestream feature, known as TikTok Live. Another internal investigation showed TikTok Live was used to launder money, sell drugs and fund terrorist groups, according to the lawsuit. Utah's case against the company is part of a groundswell of lawsuits brought by US attorneys general over alleged exploitation of children. In October, 13 states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits against TikTok on grounds similar to Utah. Read more: TikTok knew its livestreaming feature allowed child exploitation, state lawsuit alleges Meta's approach to generative artificial intelligence is to integrate it into every distribution point at the company's disposal. Any search bar in a Meta product - Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger - now hosts an iridescent blue circle that you may have clicked on by accident. Zuckerberg is fond of saying the company's AI is the most used in the world. On Friday, though, the company reckoned with backlash against its experiment with entirely AI-generated profiles on its social networks that were managed by the company itself. Meta's intention, stated to the Financial Times, undergirds the particular profiles mentioned here and imbues them with a more foreboding quality. My colleague Johana Bhuiyan reports: Meta deleted Facebook and Instagram profiles of AI characters the company had created over a year ago after users rediscovered some of the profiles and engaged them in conversations, screenshots of which went viral. The company had first introduced these AI-powered profiles in September 2023 but killed off most of them by summer 2024. However, a few characters remained and garnered new interest after the Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times late last week that the company had plans to roll out more AI character profiles. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Hayes told the FT. The automated accounts posted AI-generated pictures to Instagram and answered messages from human users on Messenger. Read more: Meta is killing off its own AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles Elon Musk is increasingly reaching his long fingers into the politics of other nations. He has endorsed Germany's far-right AfD party in an op-ed. He spent the weekend tweeting at a furious volume about "grooming gangs" in the UK. He has called on British politicians to free the jailed far-right anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, which led him to rebuke the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, whom Musk only just met at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago. In France, Emmanuel Macron has given his opinion on the influence of the world's richest man, in particular Musk's endorsement of the AfD: "Ten years ago, who would have imagined that the owner of one of the world's largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections, including in Germany". Musk is beginning to take an interest in Canadian politics, which is where I think he'll focus his full attention next. Justin Trudeau has resigned, and Musk tweeted "great interview" about Jordan Peterson's conversation with the conservative Canadian politician Pierre Poilievre on 2 January. On the morning of 6 January, the four-year anniversary of the pro-Trump insurrection attempt at the US Capitol, Musk asked his followers on X to vote in a poll: "America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government". Roughly two-thirds of them voted yes. In the few remaining weeks before Trump assumes office, American politics seem to be in Musk's rearview mirror. He is, however, still tweeting Rick and Morty screenshots about how taxes pay for the lavish lifestyles of elite pedophiles, continuing his descent into Pizzagate territory, a distinctly American phenomenon.

Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga | Siva Vaidhyanathan

It's also a mistake to describe the Meta CEO's move as a retreat from 'fact-checking': it's a retreat from limiting harm to users Mark Zuckerberg seems to have gone full Maga. Just two weeks before Donald Trump assumes power over the world's most powerful government, the CEO and founder of the most powerful collection of Internet companies has decided to capitalize on what is sure to be a large and fast retreat from accountability and regulatory curbs on corporate negligence. Some might read Zuckerberg's announcement on Tuesday that he will end the eight-year project to protect users from hatred, threats, harassment and violent imagery as an example of pandering to the president-elect's own power or Elon Musk's new role as regulatory consigliere to Trump. That would get him wrong. Zuckerberg is reverting to his core beliefs because of opportunity, not aligning himself with Trump out of fear. Zuckerberg released a video in which he announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer subject user-uploaded content to a full content-moderation review executed by both Meta itself and a constellation of contractors around the world. Instead, users will have the burden of flagging and complaining about content that causes harm or spreads dangerous misinformation about health or vulnerable people. User-guided content moderation, as we have seen on the platform formerly known as Twitter, is ridiculously ineffective. And that's the goal. Zuckerberg, as anyone who has studied his actions, mind and statements over the past two decades would tell you, is firmly committed to the principle that he knows better than the rest of us and that his company's services are good for us. The more we use them, the better we will live, he believes. The more we encounter messages that challenge us or trouble us, he believes, the more likely we are to forge better decisions for ourselves. The more we post, the more we encounter, the more we mix it up, the more we argue, the more we work toward a better society, Zuckerberg believes against all historical evidence to the contrary. He is not acting as a mercenary capitalist. He is acting as a megamaniacal ideologue, as usual. Zuckerberg's self-regard is beyond limits. Perhaps only Musk, among his peers, has more self-regard. Zuckerberg is less insecure than Musk, so he sometimes tries to come off as chastened and innocent. In fact, Zuckerberg has never retreated from his belief that he and his companies deserve the power they have and should mold the world to his vision of the greater good. It's also a mistake to describe Zuckerberg's move as a retreat from "fact-checking", as the New York Times and other outlets described the policy of content moderation. It was never about facts nor should it have been. It was always about limiting harm to Facebook users and advertisers. No reputable company wants its product or service placed next to a gruesome image of sexual exploitation, violence or bigotry. The big question about this move, as Meta makes a clear turn away from being a social media company into an artificial intelligence company, is why Zuckerberg no longer concerns himself with the desires of his advertisers. Zuckerberg has always had so much capital at his disposal he has never had to worry about money. Perhaps this is an extension of that confidence. He might figure that advertisers have no place to go as his campaign to crush TikTok in the United States seems to have succeeded after Facebook's rise already starved major media outlets of advertising revenue. Or maybe Zuckerberg is committed to freeing Meta from advertising as it develops AI tools it can sell and lease to companies and governments to generate steady revenue and even more political power. It's important to note, as surely Zuckerberg understands, that even when, from 2017 until now, Facebook and Instagram were deploying elaborate and expensive methods of filtering harmful content (including via AI and thousands of low-paid editors who worked long hours looking at and then flagging videos of animal mutilation and human decapitation) the system was far from effective. Conspiracy theories about vaccines, the earth being flat, and secret cabals who allegedly run the world have long thrived on Facebook, mostly in Facebook groups, where much content moderation failed to have much influence. The success of these paranoid fantasies cannot be attributed to their place on the true-false axis. And questioning or disproving them with solid research and evidence does not deflate them. These are symptoms and expressions of deep cultural insecurities, not a failure of cognitive ability or a deficit of knowledge. Zuckerberg was slow to implement even imperfect content moderation systems in the wake of the clear role that Facebook played in the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Once he was publicly shamed and threatened with potentially effective regulation to curb the excesses of his platforms, he relented and pledged to solve the problem through a classic example of "corporate social responsibility" short-circuiting policy efforts through self-regulation. Now, with the ascension of Trump and the complete Republican control of all three branches of the US government, the continued domination of Facebook friends such as India prime minister Narendra Modi, and the likely rise to power of extremist forces in Germany, France and other European countries, Zuckerberg no longer fears public admonition or effective regulation anywhere but Brazil, which has, under the Lula regime, stood out among powerful nations in its willingness to hold US companies to account. Zuckerberg also understands that Trump, with Zuckerberg's old enemy Musk at his side, is likely to deploy excessive leverage and power to curb Brazil's efforts to stand up to Silicon Valley on behalf of its citizens. Going forward, as Zuckerberg and Meta appear to pander to Trump, we should remember that he believes his companies to be the solution, not the cause, of our global maladies. Zuckerberg is using Trump, not the other way around.