Go Zuck Yourself

Warning: This post makes brief reference to a physical altercation between a married couple.

Time to ramp back up to my typical newsletter cadence. Today's certainly won't be too long, but I still hope to make it worth your while. Let's talk about Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.

So what's the news?

Over the last two days, Zuckerberg has dropped some announcements about Meta. The two most notable of which are:

• Three new white dudes people have been added to the Meta Board of Directors. The most notable of these is Dana White, the round mound of roid rage that, aside from running UFC, evangelistically supports Donald Trump and just three years ago was seen in a "physical altercation" with his wife of almost 30 years.
• Fact checker? I hardly know her. Meta is ending its third party fact checking program in favor of the "community notes" model of crowdsourced referendum that Twitter/X employs. Alongside this, they are "lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse."

So what?

These moves are widely seen by analysts as capitulations to an incoming conservative regime. Zuckerberg and Meta have been making a slow rightward drift over the last few years, as is evident in Zuck's increasing friendliness with right wing politicians and figures like White. These latest steps feel, at least optically, like their greatest genuflection to the machine of right wing propaganda, power, and sycophancy.

Take, for example, this quote from the blog post accompanying the content moderation announcement:

We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented.

If you are a person who has not engaged meaningfully with online rhetoric around these topics, you might see this move as a free speech net positive, but I can assure you that this is by no means a good faith effort to stoke rigorous academic debate. On basically all of these issues, the academic debate is settled. I read this and conclude that immigrants and queer people are in for more hate speech, targeted harassment, and well-funded efforts to blot them out of American society. That's more on top of the piles of bullshit marginalized communities already face on these platforms every day.

By "focusing enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations," Meta is allowing more slurs, more racism, more fake news to fester on its various platforms.

You may wonder why. How come a company that is so reliant on advertising is willingly muddying its product with garbage? I think that there are smaller political reasons and larger philosophical ones.

Zuck (and a number of his Big Tech contemporaries like Bezos and Musk) sees the incoming president as both someone willing to make rash, sweeping decisions and someone who can be easily convinced. In short, nobody has threatened Meta's bottom line more than Trump and the GOP, who have regularly accused the platform of a fictional Marxist, Christian hating, free speech suppressing, vaccine promoting bent. Zuck really does not want an executive order that limits his ability to do business, and he knows that Trump can be gladhanded. So, sitting in front of a camera and essentially saying "we made mistakes by letting people know that the Covid vaccine was safe and effective" is an effort to curtail the President's recorded disdain for the social media companies and stroke his ego. "Look how I've made them dance," Trump might sneeze to himself.

But evident in the behavior of the Big Tech robber barons is a larger philosophical debate about the usefulness of our systems. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, a reactionary and disorganized American populace spent ridiculous amounts of energy undoing the positive effects of the Reconstruction Era. Anti-immigrant sentiment, or adherence to a strict racial caste system, or needless overseas wars, or a threadbare social safety net, or sensationalist media coverage, or failing health and safety measures. The same playbook is being used by the powerful today to the same effect: [the rich get exorbitantly richer](enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations). Yet this time around, the 737 US billionaires who control $5.5 trillion aren't even building universities, cultural institutions, and housing like they did back then. This class of people is interested in further entrenching themselves away from the very people who generate their wealth via their labor, attention, and subscription dollars, and they are counting on American mistrust in government, media, and community to do so.

What is bewildering to this anecdata obsessed newsletter writer, though, is how bad all of this is for business. Yes, it is bad for the economy on the whole, it's bad for the socio-political climate, but it is also horrible business. To catch everyone up on their early 20th century history, the period from around 1890 to 1929 was a period of rapid technological advancement accompanied with extreme wealth inequality, government deregulation and legalized racial discrimination, jingoism and violent suppression of labor organization.

And what did it get us? The profits of the Industrial Revolution piled up not in the pockets of ordinary citizens, many of whom built the railroads and the automobiles that made the likes of Carnegie and Ford extremely wealthy. Instead, coke-fueled optimism and hubristic assuredness stoked by the Roaring Twenties led to the greatest financial collapse of all time. The bubble burst, and when it did the people left holding the bag found themselves on the bread lines.

Much has been made about these parallels between our past and present gilded ages. I'm not the first to call attention to them, and I certainly won't be the last. All I hope to do is remind those with their knees to the floor and their lips puckered to Trump's boot that we have seen this story before. But they almost certainly won't read this.

But you will

But you will. And there are things you can do in your daily life to mitigate the effect that the actions of a few anti-social boys sitting on the scales of justice has on you.

I encourage you to rethink your social media use. Question what you get from it relative to what it gets from you. Are there ways you can share less of yourself while still remaining connected with your friends that may be distant from you?

I encourage you not to engage with trolls and engagement baiters. The modern internet has provided an avenue to influence for the world's most annoying and angry people. Dramatically scale back the impression you have that you might change someone's opinion on the internet. Do not respond, quote tweet, follow, or otherwise interact with bad faith people looking to make a quick buck on your outrage.

I encourage you to "do your own research." Some places I would recommend include: Wikipedia, ProPublica, and the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

Thanks for reading today and Happy New Year. This year I hope to write around 40 newsletters, so make sure not to delete me from your inbox! Love, Alex.