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
Full Episode
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got the perfect guest for today's Facebook news. Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of the newsletter Galaxy Brain about technology, media, and big ideas. He's also the co-author of Out of Office, The Big Problem, and Bigger Promise.com.
of working from home that's not on our to-do list today we have too much to discuss to discuss my working from home thoughts but maybe another day how you doing charlie i'm doing great thanks for having me you know i initially had reached out uh because you're an awesome article about crypto and i was like i want to do a crypto episode with charlie and uh you know the news gods had other ideas we'll get to crypto at the end for people dying to hear our hot takes about you know ethereum
But Mark Zuckerberg is out with some news this morning. And I just want to read exactly what the announcement is from Facebook so we can make sure to get it right here. He is replacing, not that that matters anymore, but he is replacing fact checkers with community notes in the model of Twitter. That's number one.
Number two, simplifying content policies to remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender. that are out of touch with the mainstream discourse. He's moving the trust and safety content teams from California. The California teams were too biased.
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.
I mean, the fact that this announcement is coming on January 7th... I'd go back.
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