Meta is going MAGA. New York magazine’s John Herrman explains Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover. Writer Ben Wofford introduces Meta’s policy puppet master. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn with help from Travis Larchuck, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc. during an event. Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What changes is Mark Zuckerberg making at Meta?
Mark Zuckerberg's in his cool era. He's letting his hair grow out. He's wearing black t-shirts with a gold chain. He covered Get Low with T-Pain. That's him singing. Mark Zuckerberg is also in his MAGA era. He's throwing a party at Trump's inauguration next week. He went on Joe Rogan to say companies need more masculine energy. He's ending Meta's DEI initiatives.
He's taking tampons out of the men's bathrooms at his offices. He's getting rid of the non-binary and transgender themes on Meta's Messenger app. But perhaps most important of all, he's changing Meta's content moderation and fact-checking policies. We are going to poke around the new Zuck Your Feelings Metaverse on Today Explained.
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Today Explained
Content moderation and fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram is kind of like oxygen. You can't see it, but it's out there, and it's essential to your user experience. It's getting rid of all the illegal material, the hateful material, and the spam. John Herman has been writing about the changes Meta's making to content moderation for New York Magazine.
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Chapter 2: How is content moderation being affected on Meta platforms?
And if you're like, content moderation is boring, a reminder that without it, we have seen real-world political violence.
Exactly. And the fact-checking piece was intended to sort of close a little bit of a loophole that existed with news content, where if false or inflammatory stories about, say, an ethnic minority in a country going through political strife were going viral again and again and again, they could feed into real political violence and have.
While the persecution of the Muslim minority continued for years, the picture changed drastically once Facebook entered the fray in 2012.
Anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya memes and propaganda have spread through Facebook, eroding support for the Rohingya's flight.
And, you know, in 2016, there was a lot of domestic pressure on Facebook to address the similar issues.
During the last three months of the presidential campaign fake or false news headlines actually generated more engagement on Facebook than true ones.
People actually believe a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager John Podesta ran a child sex ring at a pizzeria in DC. This is a lie.
To borrow Facebook's language, it was creating a less authentic environment, which is an incredible euphemism for a place that, you know, was just full of garbage. And so for a while, the critics of Meta and Facebook and Facebook and Meta were sort of aligned. That is no longer true. That is very pointedly not true.
Now Zuckerberg is killing this program. Zuckerberg posted a video explaining his reasoning. What did you make of the video? He looked so good with his hair and his T-shirt.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of Zuckerberg's new image?
He's talking about how, you know, he was being sort of pushed around and bullied by the Biden administration.
And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.
In this announcement and then elsewhere on posts on threads and on the Joe Rogan experience, talking about how, you know, maybe if people are going to leave over these changes, they're just virtue signaling.
Society has become very like, I don't know, I don't even know the right word for it, but it's like, it kind of like, neutered or like emasculated.
And so, you know, probably the most striking thing about this video is how, on one hand, it's really familiar. This is Mark Zuckerberg after an election sort of laying things out and saying, you know, we are listening. We are working on this. We're trying to fix things. His audience is just different now. It's a different group of people.
It's not a critical press or potential regulators that he thought were important in 2016. He is now sort of, you know, looking in the imminent future and saying, all right, like, how can we work with you? I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there and more to come soon.
And tell us exactly what the new policy is. Is it just we're going to let you guys hash it out in the comments? Kind of.
So the two lanes for this are one is that the fact checking program is being discontinued. This got sort of like top billing from Zuckerberg. But the bigger changes are to Facebook's basic and much broader moderation systems. So. There are a few new carve-outs. You are allowed to use more dehumanizing speech about transgender people, immigrants.
You are allowed to more broadly use harsher language in your interactions on the platform.
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Chapter 4: How are Meta's policies shifting regarding free expression?
Mark Zuckerberg says that they will be rolling out a community notes style program. If you've been on X through Elon Musk's sort of takeover and remaking of the site, you'll know that they have a system that sort of allows users to weigh in on posts and say, this is true, this is misrepresentative, this is not true, the posts then carry this tag, things like that.
It's an interesting and frankly useful feature on X, but it is not nearly up to the task of broad platform moderation. It tends to be slow. And I think the circumstances on Facebook, for example, are much less conducive to a good community notes program. We'll see what they build.
But it is, I think, a partial replacement at best for the fact checking program that existed before, which was already not doing a whole lot.
You brought up the transition Twitter made when Elon took over. My experience as a user of that regrettable platform is my feed started getting... more confusing quite frankly there was more spam coming in to my dms there were more verified users who were just you know random people who wanted to amplify their voices it got harder to tell
misinformation or even disinformation from reliable information. I started seeing porn in my feed more often, like the whole thing just got messier. Is that what people should expect from their experience on Facebook or Instagram right now?
In some ways, I think yes. And what's funny is I've had the same or similar feelings about the transformation of X. One thing that kept coming to mind is that this platform, which was certainly always flawed and full of all kinds of stuff that you didn't necessarily want to see or whatever. It was always a complicated product. It felt kind of familiar.
It kind of felt like pre-2016 Facebook, where you're just scrolling around, things are kind of out of order. literally not chronological. You don't know where things are coming from, why you're seeing them. It's just an unstable, but in some ways very engaging environment.
In rolling those back, there's a return potentially to this version of Facebook that the company left behind nearly 10 years ago. And yeah, the most useful current comparison is certainly X, which, you know, in some ways is probably doing very well in the eyes of its owner, but is used by far fewer people, is now a sort of fairly hostile political environment for a lot of its previous users.
It is far less useful in, for example, a disaster like the fires in L.A. County or recent hurricanes. It is just full of untrustworthy information from untrustworthy people who are often there with malign ends to misinform, to make money, to spam. It's a different kind of place. you know, euphemistically, it's rougher on the edges, it's rowdier. Functionally, it just doesn't work as well.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the new fact-checking policies?
These are commercial advertising and subscription platforms with tons of restrictions on what you can do and what you can say, and that fundamental fact hasn't changed. The flavor of censorship is what's changing.
John Herman is a tech columnist and intelligencer from New York Magazine. You can read and subscribe at nymag.com. There's one guy over at Meta who's in charge of getting the flavor of censorship just right. And his name's not Mark, it's Joel. We need to talk about Joel next on Today Explained.
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Chapter 6: How is misinformation being handled on social media today?
And he leads, Kaplan, a team of about 1,000 policy staff worldwide in Facebook, shaping and massaging and sometimes thwarting the international laws and regulatory bodies and policies that graze any part of Facebook's enormous business. But it's this third role that has made Kaplan so controversial, and that is helping design and arbitrate
Facebook's policies on political speech, which have changed so much and so dramatically over the last 10 years.
Ben says Joel Kaplan is a Forrest Gump type figure. He went to Harvard. He was a good progressive college student. But then the Gulf War starts and he finds himself feeling more conservative. He graduates, enlists. goes to law school and comes out a proper Republican, clerks for Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court, becomes best buds with Brett Kavanaugh.
And then he joins up with George W. Bush, serves all eight years in the Bush administration. And then he gets out and he's like, what's next? And that's just when his old pal from Harvard, Sheryl Sandberg, calls him up and offers him a job.
Kaplan's role for the first three years, he's one of a number of elder statesman types surrounding a younger Zuckerberg who has increasingly realized that the reach of his company is going to be entangled in policy matters in Washington. Senator, we run ads. I see.
It's during this period, you call it sort of from 2011 to 2016, that Kaplan, if not a mentor, is sort of described by colleagues as sort of an older brother figure to a younger Zuckerberg. He's accompanying Zuckerberg to tech summits in the Obama Oval Office.
My name is Barack Obama, and I'm the guy who got marked to wear a jacket and tie.
By the time Kaplan comes out of those eight years in the Bush White House, he's got a reputation as a real bipartisan impresario. So Kaplan is a certain breed of Bush conservative that is open-handed and warm and interested in bipartisan compromise. And it's part of why he's so prolific and such a valuable asset to any lobbying operation or company, but especially to Facebook.
There are lots of these moments where Facebook is growing. It stumbles on some kind of tripwire of conservative politics it didn't know was there. And the company sort of frantically looks around and says, who do we have who's like a singular Republican operative who can help us with this problem? And over and over and over again, the answer is just Joel Kaplan, Joel Kaplan, Joel Kaplan.
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Chapter 7: What role does Joel play in Meta's content policies?
Smart people and scholars who think about the architecture of the internet and social media really encourage people to step back and look at Facebook and think about how unusual it is and how not obvious or self-explanatory it is.
that the person who would be in charge of your political lobbying and policy operation is also largely in charge of crafting and designing the policies around content and speech. I think the one inside story that really summarizes Kaplan's role and influence happens in 2017. And that's with a really radical proposal called Common Ground.
So after 2016, there's this shock about the election and how ugly it was. And Common Ground has these big ambitious goals all about reducing polarization with a cocktail of what they call, quote, aggressive interventions. They're going to downrank ugly incivility and optimize for, quote, good conversations and upregulate that kind of discussion. And it's all about the algorithm.
So the new algorithm was going to recommend users join more politically diverse groups, for example. It was going to reduce the viral reach of hyperactive, hyperpartisan users. And the Common Ground team is really juiced. They're excited. They've hung posters around the office in Menlo Park that have their motto on it and say things like, reduce polarization or reduce hate.
And then Common Ground runs into Joel Kaplan. And Kaplan's policy team grills these programmers and project managers with questions. Questions not just about how it's going to be perceived by users, but how the changes will be experienced and perceived by political stakeholders.
And with Trump in office, Facebook is much more sensitive to how any changes, even neutral nonpartisan changes like common ground, might be perceived by politicians or media persona who have a big megaphone. and can generate a political crisis and headache for Facebook.
So in the end, a few of the tweaks of Common Ground got through, but in the end, almost all of Common Ground was scrapped and put on the shelf and never saw the light of day.
OK, Ben, you've helped us get to know this shadowy figure at Facebook, at Meta. He's been lurking around our government and our platforms for decades. But what does all of this mean for the next four years of Meta, Mark and Donald?
So to me, Kaplan's professional life. And his corporate values at Facebook suggest to me that there's almost no limit to the necessities and prerogatives of survival that Kaplan can't find a way to accommodate. I guess a different way of putting this would be Zuckerberg's donating...
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