Meta’s abandoning of fact checkers and dialling down its content moderation policy has less to do with freedom of expression or censorship and more to do with currying favour with president elect Donald Trump, writes B&T’s features and analysis editor Arvind Hickman. These platforms could end up with poorer user experiences, but do brands care enough to flee Facebook and Instagram en masse?
Meta’s about face on fact-checking and content moderation is a small victory for Trump ahead of his inauguration on 20 January.
Find out more: Zuck Follows Musk: Meta To Bin ‘Politically Biased’ Fact Checkers, Also Takes Swipe At Governments ‘Pushing To Censor More’
For years, Trump had taken aim at Meta after it banned him from Facebook and Instagram after the January 6 Capitol Hill attacks. Although Trump had since been reinstated, tensions had been simmering until recent months.
Zuckerberg met up with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort and the business has since donated $1 million towards his inauguration. Meta’s global affairs chief Nick Clegg—a political centrist—has now been succeeded by the conservative Joe Kaplan, the former deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush.
The icing on the cake is adding MMA boss Dana White, a close ally of Trump’s, to the board of Meta.
These moves in isolation might not mean too much, but it has been clear for weeks, if not months, that Zuckerberg has been courting Trump, perhaps playing catch up to rival billionaire and X owner Elon Musk.
This has now manifested in changes to how Meta plans to police hate speech and potentially harmful content on its platform.
Gone are the fact checkers that were once the frontline in Meta’s battle against misinformation and disinformation, while content moderation has been substantially dialled down and this team has moved from liberal-leaning California to conservative heartland Texas, apparently to remove perceptions of political bias.
What it means
As a result of these changes it seems likely that misinformation and disinformation will spread like wildfire on Meta’s platforms.
Certain marginalised communities, such as immigrants and the transgender community, now appear to be fair game because Zuckerberg believes that the previous content policy had become “out of touch with mainstream discourse”.
Per tech magazine Wired: “In tandem with this announcement, the company made a number of updates across its Community Guidelines, an extensive set of rules that outline what kinds of content are prohibited on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. Some of the most striking changes were made to Meta’s “Hateful Conduct” policy, which covers discussions on immigration and gender.
“In a notable shift, the company now says it allows ‘allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird’.”
It’s a touch ironic that you can make policy decisions based on what you believe to be “mainstream discourse” on one hand, while at the same time say that your platform should not be the arbiter of what is right or wrong, fact or fiction.
Zuckerberg and global affairs chief Kaplan’s rationale that Meta’s fact checkers and moderation teams had “gone too far” and “become too biased” is a well-trodden conservative attack that has been levelled at Facebook for several years, but only now has it led to an about turn.
In his video announcement, Zuckerberg pointed out that even if just “one per cent” of posts were mistakenly removed, it amounted to millions of people being unable to post. It questionable why if only one per cent of posts were “mistakenly” removed, one would invite a free-for-all that will almost certainly increase misinformation and toxicity on your platform.
Perhaps less moderation means more posts, more time spent on platform and more advertising dollars?
Or perhaps the bigger prize is winning the heart and mind of Trump, especially at a time when Meta is in an AI arms race with other tech titans.
There are also looming legal battles and global regulatory hurdles in which having the US president in your corner cannot hurt. Meta is facing the three major trials that could threaten its existence as we know it, including a US Federal Trade Commission that will accuse it of breaching monopoly rules and could demand the company is broken up.
It’s worth noting that Zuckerberg is not alone in making this calculation. Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, the proprietor of the Washington Post, was willing to alienate large swathes of his newsroom by not publicly endorsing Kamala Harris in the US election, while Musk has pumped more than US$100 million ($Au160 million) into Trump’s campaign coffers and turned X (and its algorithm) into a powerful pro-Tump propaganda machine.
Zuckerberg must be seeing which way the wind is blowing and has proven adept at responding to political swings before through policy changes that align with the US government of the day, or in response to Facebook’s past cock ups. It was only four years ago that Meta banned Trump when it was politically expedient to do so. When times shift, so do Meta’s policies that were introduced for yesterday’s problem.
The upshot for Oz
What does this mean for advertisers and users, especially in Australia?
Not much, just yet. It’s unclear if and when fact checking will be removed in Australia and community notes will appear.
Media buyers have told B&T that they will take a wait-and-see approach on how the changes impact the user and advertiser experience before advising advertisers to alter their media plans.
But one executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, warns that top tier advertisers might look at recent developments at Meta, including the new age-gating rules and the platform’s response to that, as well as this new policy shift as a reason to “reassess their long-term relationship” with Zuck’s behemoth, especially if the platform emerges with a worse user experience—though at this stage that’s a big ‘if’.
If that happens, other platforms, such as TikTok and YouTube, may benefit in the short-term. Though in the long run, it’s unlikely to have any lasting effect on the world’s largest social media company.
Meta has proven, time and again, that it is resilient in the face of adversity. If we wind back to Cambridge Analytica, measurements scandals and brand safety issues of the past, the response from some of the larger advertisers has either been a short-term boycott or a collective shrug of the shoulders, then business as usual.
And even if they chose to boycott, the overwhelming majority of Meta’s advertising revenue comes from smaller to medium sized businesses, so the business is well insulated from this storm.
Zuckerberg’s pivot towards Trump may upset hordes of users and a few advertising types, but could actually prove to be a shrewd business decision for the company going forward.
Now that would be a deal Donald J Trump would be proud of.
