Meta’s Allowance of Hate Speech Is Another Side Effect of Big Tech Monopoly
By Mike Ludwig ,Truthout
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announced on January 8 that Instagram and Facebook would remove third-party fact-checking teams and replace them with a “community notes” system similar to that of Elon Musk’s X, where users can flag posts for misinformation and clarifying comments are crowdsourced and added with X’s approval.
Despite lofty talk about “free
speech,” Zuckerberg’s announcement was quickly pegged by critics as a political
move meant to appease Donald Trump, his incoming administration and its very
online fan base.
Despite Trump’s narrow electoral victory, Zuckerberg is only the latest billionaire mogul to show an unprecedented level of fealty to the incoming president.
As reporters at Axios put it, Trump is entering office with “ever-expansive power” as a result. Multiple major tech firms have made large donations to Trump’s inauguration fund, with Google, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI pledging $1 million each.
“I don’t think you have to be a content moderation expert to be able to look at this and see that Mark Zuckerberg is bending the knee to Trump,” said Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, in an interview. “This is frankly what human rights experts have been concerned about for years, when we sort of play this game of working the referees in a game that the public always loses.”
In his announcement, Zuckerberg promised “more speech and fewer mistakes” on his massive platforms but admitted that content moderators would now “catch less bad stuff.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization that promotes freedom of speech and digital rights, initially put out a cautiously optimistic blog post in response to Zuckerberg’s move.
Meta has in the past controversially blocked content that passes muster
according to its own guidelines — just this week it was reported that
Facebook wrongly censored LGBTQ content — and
EFF supports good faith efforts to fix the problem. The group said Meta should
focus on commonly censored but legitimate content posted by sex worker
organizers or political dissidents outside of the United States, for example.
“These are not ‘us’ issues, these are global issues,” said
David Greene, EFF’s civil liberties director and coauthor of the blog post, in
an interview. “A lot of mistakes are made with political dissident speech in
other [countries], so these are issues that are problematic all around the
world.”
However, the EFF cautioned that Meta’s decision to move
content moderation teams from California to Texas in order to combat “bias” is
clearly more political than practical and raises big questions about
Zuckerberg’s intentions.
“It’s just stupid. That’s the most obvious political thing,”
Greene said, adding that the change reflects the biases of the U.S. political
right. “If anything, what they’ve done is traded perceived California bias for
perceived Texas bias.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement was part of a busy week for Meta’s public relations, amid concerns — including from its own staff — about recent company changes. Facebook was caught censoring employees on a company forum who were posting jokes and complaints about the decision to add United Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to Meta’s Board of Directors.
White campaigned for
Trump, and Facebook employees pointed to a 2022 video of White slapping his wife in a nightclub. The
posts were taken down for violating community standards, according to tech reporters at 404Media. (Despite
Zuckerberg’s “free speech” rhetoric, 404Media also says its
stories about censorship on Facebook are censored on the platform. Musk
is also notorious for espousing “free speech” on X.)
Then news broke revealing that Meta was also quietly relaxing hate speech standards, with The Independent in Britain reporting that Facebook and Instagram users are now allowed to call women “property” and protected groups like transgender people “freaks” on those platforms.
According to Meta, dehumanizing or insulting posts that
could previously be flagged and removed are now allowed in the context of
political debate over “transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality.”
LGBTQ groups denounced Zuckerberg and warned of
widespread harassment and violence. The EFF called the changes “concerning” as
researchers rushed to analyze the new policy.
EFF issued a new statement on Thursday, saying it
was a “mistake to formulate our responses and expectations on what is
essentially a marketing video for upcoming policy changes before any of those
changes were reflected in their documentation.” Instead of taking a closer look
at marginalized voices that had been unfairly censored, Meta took the opposite
tack, making targeted changes that would “allow dehumanizing statements to be
made about certain vulnerable group.”
“There wasn’t a need to sort of a refine their hate speech
policy,” Greene said. “It does lend a lot of support to the idea that this was
more of a primarily political capitulation than it was an earnest attempt to
revise pressing problems with content moderation.”
Democrats and liberals responded with outrage to
Zuckerberg’s apparent appeasement of conservatives, who have attacked social
media companies for years with debunked claims that moderators combatting
misinformation, hate speech and harassment are biased against them. However,
some activists say Facebook was not doing a great job to protecting users and
marginalized voices to begin with. They also argue that social media CEOs have
proven to be politically malleable, adjusting their content moderation policies
based on which U.S. party is in power and prioritizing profit over protecting
users.
Greer said that the intensely partisan nature of the debate
over content moderation obscures the bigger problem.
“As long as we have these Big Tech companies that dominate
so much of our information space … they are always going to kowtow to
governments, whether the U.S. or others, in ways that impact people’s
expression,” Greer said in an interview. “What bums me out is that it feels
like people are sort of happy to go along with that when the party they support
is in power, and only get concerned about it when the party they don’t support
is in power.”
Greer worries that too much time and effort from digital
activists is spent fighting over content moderation policies while true freedom
of speech will remain elusive as long as a tiny handful of surveillance
platforms run by self-interested capitalists have a stranglehold on the online
spaces where we hold important discussions.
Liberals typically say they want more moderation from private companies while conservatives generally want less, but Greer says this seemingly endless debate misses the point: Instead of trying to work the referees, Greer says, it would be better to demand lawmakers address structural issues, including privacy legislation that would limit the monopolies on surveillance technology and personal data collection and that have allowed social media companies to grow so big and destructive in the first place.
Big Tech
thrives off of sucking up and selling our personal data, and social media
giants can simply copy innovations made by competitors and kill them off with
sheer control over the market, Greer said.
Such legislation is “not going to turn the internet into a
utopia, but it would get us on a path toward healthy online spaces where people
can express themselves, and users have more tools to curate their own online
experience rather than having done for them by politically motivated
billionaires,” Greer said.
With Republicans in control Congress for at least the next
two years, Greer is not expecting sweeping privacy protections or antitrust
reforms to come out of Washington D.C. anytime soon. However, Fight for the
Future is planning to push for legislation at the state level. Greer pointed to
the digital privacy law California passed in 2018, which is not
perfect but points in the direction policymakers should be heading.
Such policies would make more room for alternatives to the
big platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X. There has been an explosion in
use of competitors, including Mastodon and Bluesky, particularly as
left-leaning users leave X in protest of Musk’s censorship and right-wing
outbursts in support of Trump. Social media is set up to make
leaving a platform difficult, especially for people who have built a large
following or business that cannot be transferred to another site. Giving users
ownership over their own followers and data could be key to breaking Big Tech’s
stranglehold on social media.
Still, the movement toward alternatives is lighting a path
forward.
“People are remembering that social media is kind of us,
when it’s not woefully distorted and stultified in the interest of monopolists
and capitalists, and we can have alternatives,” Greer said.
Mike Ludwig is a staff reporter
at Truthout based in New Orleans. He is also the writer and
host of “Climate Front Lines,” a podcast about the
people, places and ecosystems on the front lines of the climate crisis. Follow
him on Twitter: @ludwig_mike.
