Naomi Nix
Appearances
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
Yeah. We're kind of having this collision of an increasing sort of decentralization in the social media market where people get to flock to the apps that they enjoy that might have their kind of partisan leanings. And we're seeing the main platforms walk back many of their programs to fight decentralization. misinformation.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
And I think those two things coupled together means that people can kind of, you know, go to their own sort of corners and hot pockets of misinformation or hate speech and not get the kind of fact checks, and people rebutting those claims to a lesser degree.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
Right. People simply just have more options. And various apps have really wildly different approaches to policing speech.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
It's definitely true that during the pandemic, the Biden administration was particularly aggressive at making sure that Meta removed what they consider to be COVID-19 related misinformation. I think we might all remember that moment when Joe Biden essentially accused Facebook publicly of killing people.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
But it's also true that, to be clear, both Republicans and Democrats, politicians have always tried to, quote unquote, work the refs at social media companies, you know, either advocating, whether it's like advocating getting their, you know, personal information off the site or advocating, you know, an expansion of Harassment policies.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
That pressure has always been there, but tech companies have always had the freedom to say no. And I think what we've seen, even in the Biden administration example around COVID-19, is Meta said no a lot. Because at the end of the day, they don't actually have to take orders from any politician about what's going on.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
what kind of content should or shouldn't be on their site unless there's some sort of law or regulation passed. And so, you know, I think the case definitely brought up interesting questions around what should the relationship be between how the government interacts with social media companies behind the scenes.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
I think you're right. His use of the word censorship was a big rhetorical win for Republicans and conservatives. You know, in previous years, the company would have used the industry's word, which is content moderation, right? They would not have framed those programs that they had worked on for years as a form of censorship.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
I think I kind of miss the camaraderie when Clubhouse got really popular during the pandemic. Yeah, there was a sort of community and camaraderie of that moment that I miss.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
Yeah, I think, though, that Meta saying that is an important signal to the social media ecosystem. Remember back when Elon Musk took over the platform, we saw a rise just from that fact alone. The rules hadn't really been substantially changed at that point. There hadn't been a lot of changes to what was then called Twitter. But we saw a rise in You know, bigotry on the platform.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
Researchers were sort of tracking it just by the fact that he had taken over the company. And so I think meta kind of laying out, here's exactly the ways that we are sort of rolling back these hate speech rules and the kinds of claims that actually we're going to go out and publicly say you're allowed to say something.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
That alone might be an important signal to people in the social media ecosystem about what they choose to share on the platform, who chooses to join the platform. Time will tell. It was kind of like Mark Zuckerberg planting a flag in the cultural wars. is how I kind of saw it and sort of like moving the bounds of like what is considered acceptable speech.
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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
And of course, what the company argues and what he argues is that we're just trying to catch up the hate speech rules to what mainstream discourse actually is. That's kind of the argument, but it's definitely a notable shift in tone from the company.