Mark Zuckerberg is doing all he can to get an audience with the big man at Mar-a-Lago, including praising Trump's (faux) free speech bona fides and restructuring Meta to eliminate fact-checking. Maybe it's because Zuck wants to show his middle finger to the mean tech reporters—or maybe it's because Trump threatened to imprison Zuck. Plus, the conspiracies around Jan 6 v 9/11, and the potential threat to our financial system from crypto. Charlie Warzel joins Tim Miller. show notes: Charlie's piece on internet brain rot Charlie's piece on crypto and the potential nightmare in Trump 2.0
Chapter 1: What changes is Zuckerberg making to Facebook's content policies?
He's going to move them to Texas, which is a beacon of just this right down the middle of the road political ideology in Texas, no bias in Texas, or moving the moderators to the worst jobs in the world, I think, the content moderators. Those people, the moderation slums are moving from California to Texas to weed out bias. We've also, I think,
It's going to get less attention, but I think potentially the most pernicious thing that is happening is they're bringing back more political content to the algorithm and the news feed. They're not deranking that anymore. Crazy shit people post is going to be back in your Facebook news feed if you are of the demographic that uses the Facebook news feed. So those are the big updates.
Joel Kaplan went on Fox to discuss. I have some audio from that I want to get to, but I want your big picture thoughts on the changes first.
Sure. I woke up to this like full candor like an hour ago. Yeah, same. My thoughts on this are basically, I think that Mark Zuckerberg is very, and I felt this way for a while, very ashamed of everything that he and Facebook did between, let's say, March 1st, 2020 and January 10th, 2021, right? So... beginning of the COVID pandemic, right into, you know, post-January 6th.
Chapter 2: Why is Zuckerberg restructuring Meta's moderation approach?
I mean, the fact that this announcement is coming on January 7th... I'd go back.
I think he's probably ashamed of what they did starting in 2016, trying to root out the Cambridge Analytica stuff and all that. I don't think he cares about, actually.
I would agree with that. But I think, too, you know, they were... up against a lot of pressure there. And they were always trying to do the very least. They were being dragged along by people. But Zuckerberg did an interview in March or April of 2020 with my old boss, who was at The Times then, Ben Smith, about COVID misinformation.
And it was like the first interview I'd really heard from Zuckerberg, where he was basically like, no, it's good that we're like censoring, quote unquote, right? Like, it's good that we're taking action against this. This is a very clear cut situation in which there is actual harm, you know, connected to this type of content, these type of words, right?
And I think – I bet you if you had to, like, read that to him in front of him, he would just, like, cringe, like, full body, right? Because I think there's this real understanding in his mind, in the mind of a lot of the people who he's running with in these circles in Silicon Valley and in the world of, like, UFC or jujitsu or whatever, that there's this –
you know, this huge overreach during the COVID and the, you know, the lead up to the 2020 election. And then of course the big one, right after January 6th, you know, getting rid of Trump, all of that stuff. I mean, the fact that this announcement is taking place on January 7th, four years later is like, it's a big, like middle finger.
I feel like to this idea of like the hall monitors, like you have lost is I think what he's trying to communicate here.
Yeah, I think that there are two elements to this. One is the forward-looking Trump suck-up part, and one is the regrets looking back part. We're going to get to the Trump suck-up part, but let's continue down the looking back part first. Bill Kristol in our internal Slack wrote this. I told him I was going to steal it from him, but I'll credit it. He was like, here's the thing.
The fact-checking ended up being mostly pointless. There's not a lot of evidence of fact-checking part work. I think de-ranking things from feed mattered. I feel like the fact-checking ended up not being that useful. I'm open to the fact that there's counter-research on this. Maybe you've seen.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of fact-checking ending on Facebook?
But Bill writes, Zuck now denouncing Facebook's fact-checking when he implemented it, was in charge of it, arranged it, supervised it, paid for it for years, is like a Stalinist show trial type of self-denunciation for the new leader. Yeah. And I think it is part putting on the hair shirt for Trump. But I do think he also has some of his own regrets about it.
But he hasn't he hasn't done the mature thing of like accepting responsibility for the decisions he made as one of the richest people in the world. And in this announcement, it's like the legacy media and these annoying hall monitors forced me to do this. And now it's like, now this is my big middle finger back at them. But as you point out, that's not really true.
He could have done whatever he wanted, really. It's not like the Biden regulators were coming for him. And he believed a lot of the stuff based on that interview with Ben Smith. But he hasn't kind of accepted responsibility for that. It doesn't feel like. He's blaming this on you, Charlie. It's your fault that he has had to do this.
Well, yes. And you know what? I'll take the blame. I agree with that completely. I've been covering this company for, you know, I don't know, more than a decade now.
And there's this classic thing that Zuckerberg especially does where he sort of rolls out something new and basically says, like, he speaks as if he has amnesia from the past or as if like, you know, a totally new paradigm has formed, right? It's like, we're getting into groups, we're getting into community building. Everyone just wants to gather with people around shared interests.
And then like QAnon happens and he's like, I don't know what people were, were, were doing, you know, trying to gather in these groups that were just forcing people into these groups. So what we really want to do is this, like they were all about news and prioritizing the newsfeed. I mean, when I worked at Buzzfeed in 2013, one day, literally just one day in October, uh,
We had 300 times the amount of referral traffic that we normally had to the entire site. And it was because someone at Facebook turned a dial and there was all this stuff because Facebook wanted to get in bed, partner with these news organizations, be a place where news, you know, reading where all this happened.
Then they realized that like, oh, that's quite when they cared about reading.
Then they realized, oh, your grandma is getting radicalized. It's a terrible experience for absolutely every person on the app to be inundated with political news 24-7. And they were like, this political news, it's bad. It's like, you did this. You did this. You control the website. You are making the editorial decisions.
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Chapter 4: How does Zuckerberg's relationship with Trump affect Facebook?
It's like, that's what- You can't let a naked person walk through the store. You can't let somebody like Blair with an iPad, like showing NC-17 cadaver porn. Like you can't walk into the Starbucks doing that, right? Like, or else people won't go to the Starbucks.
And that's what it is. And, you know, occasionally there's an edge case, right? There's a guy who comes in who's, playing by most of the rules, but he's listening to his iPad too loud. And you have to say like, Hey man, sorry, can you turn it down? And that becomes the censorship. Like, yeah, the edge cases are frustrating. It sucks.
It sucks to be on the other end of that, especially when you didn't think you were violating the rules, but you have to have some kind of standard in a communal space. It's just like, like basic humanity.
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Chapter 5: What role does crypto play in the current media landscape?
Chapter 6: How are content moderation practices evolving in tech?
Chapter 7: What does the future hold for free speech on social media?
And like when you talk to people that are in charge of actual moderation, I mean, what they see every day is so insane. I mean, like the dregs of society, like just with the scale that Facebook has or Twitter, any of these things have. Even random message boards, the scale a small message board has.
the amount of like gross porn, you know, murders, like stuff you would never want children to see on the platform. Some of the adults don't want to see stuff that they were showing at the end of the substance, which I suffered through last night, like teeth coming out of people's mouths. I'm like racist stuff. Like, It is so challenging to moderate all that, even with AI, even with technology.
And so like this, if you turn down the notch on like kind of the automatic vetting, you know, of certain keywords or key terms or key images, like then the amount of shit you don't want to see elevates spam. I just should have included spam in there. And it becomes Craigslist. It literally becomes... I remember Craigslist was a great place to buy tickets or sell furniture and stuff now.
And now it's like the only thing on Craigslist is scammers trying to steal your money and porn and weird stuff.
It's a really good point because people don't realize, right? It all gets caught up in the censorship conversation. And so much of the job, like you said, everywhere on the internet, from the smallest message board to whatever, moderation is just... People should think of it as like... okay, here's a Starbucks, right? Like we have to clean the bathrooms, right?
We have to wipe down the counters every night at the end of the day.
It's like, that's what- You can't let a naked person walk through the store. You can't let somebody like Blair with an iPad, like showing NC-17 cadaver porn. Like you can't walk into the Starbucks doing that, right? Like, or else people won't go to the Starbucks.
And that's what it is. And, you know, occasionally there's an edge case, right? There's a guy who comes in who's, playing by most of the rules, but he's listening to his iPad too loud. And you have to say like, Hey man, sorry, can you turn it down? And that becomes the censorship. Like, yeah, the edge cases are frustrating. It sucks.
It sucks to be on the other end of that, especially when you didn't think you were violating the rules, but you have to have some kind of standard in a communal space. It's just like, like basic humanity.
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Chapter 8: How do Zuckerberg's policies reflect broader tech industry trends?
And I want to play a clip from it.
There's no question that the things that happen at Met are coming from Mark. But there's also no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure all in the direction of 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. One of the things we've experienced is that when you have a U.S.
president administration that's pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don't even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies. We're going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.
Well, if Joel was here, I'd ask him how Trump's ass tastes. But since he's not and you're here, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Donald Trump, fighter of free expression, wants to take away broadcast rights from people who criticized him, sued Bill Maher for calling him the son of an orangutan.
He's got his new FBI director suing our friend Olivia Troy for being mean to him on cable news. Just a free expression absolutist, lover of the First Amendment, Donald Trump. That's why they're doing this, right? Charlie, just because they just are right in line with these first principles with the new administration. Was that Fox Business or Fox News? Fox News.
Okay, I thought it was Fox Business. I was like, that's really like, then you've really gone, you know, down the rabbit hole. Man, I mean, that says it all, right? Like that really, to me... says it all, right? We're just... How do we get an audience with the big man, you know, before, without going to Mar-a-Lago is clearly... Let's get on Fox News and say some nice things about that.
I mean, I don't know. I get the whole pandering to Trump thing, but I almost feel like there's something real about it now. I wonder if the circles that... He that Zuckerberg is, you know, hanging out in like the proximity to like the MMA crowd. I don't think he put Dana White on the board of Facebook yesterday because he is trying to pander necessarily to Trump.
I think he likes to hang out with Dana White. I think it can be. I think it can be both. And what I'm just. there's a way to pander to him. And I think that that is like signaling. And I mean, I think he kind of did it pre election, right? Like the, the Tim Cook style of pandering, right? The, the donate to the transition, send a nice tweet.
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