Main Edition
US
FR
January 8, 2025 - 6:00pm
On Tuesday, America’s favourite newly-permed CEO and bona fide chill-guy Mark Zuckerberg struck another blow to “Big Woke”. He announced that Meta will pivot to a Musk-inspired, community-driven moderation approach. This move marks yet another data point in Silicon Valley’s ongoing vibe shift away from progressivism, ahead of Trump’s second term. True to form, Zuck continues to follow the cultural winds and with social media platforms at a crossroads, Meta’s recalibration could reignite its cultural relevance.
Meta is abandoning third-party fact-checking for a “Community Notes” system, borrowing from Trump-ally Elon Musk’s playbook on X. No longer the arbiter of “what’s real”, Meta will now place that responsibility on users, transforming annotations into a new form of viral content as we’ve seen numerous times on X. But this isn’t just about political expediency, it’s also a survival strategy. With the boot of legacy media and governmental oversight no longer on its neck, Meta could spend more time innovating on other parts of its business. In other words, to echo Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Meta is a tech company, not a culture war company — for now, at least — and it shouldn’t be wasting brain power determining if the speech on their platform is sufficiently politically sensitive.
The timing is also strategic given the looming TikTok ban, which could displace millions of creators and their audiences. If engagement on Instagram and Facebook goes up as a result of moderation changes, Meta could position Instragram Reels as the refuge for this exodus in a landscape where many creators are questioning whether they should throw in the towel altogether, feeling like there are no platform alternatives. It might even ultimately position itself as more appealing, as TikTok itself is known for its draconian moderation policies. Zuckerberg specifically mentioned immigration and gender as two topics that would now be free from fact-checking moderation. This could open the floodgates to other contentious issues, making the Meta free-for-all far more appealing than a strict TikTok.
But what will the fact-checkers be replaced by? Meta is rolling out AI integration, as we saw last week when it suggested it would pump platforms full of synthetic profiles. By harnessing AI’s ability to generate personalised content, simulate vibrant user interactions, and adapt dynamically to user preferences, Meta has the potential to redefine what a social platform is. Executed effectively, AI could transform Meta into a hive of constant activity — an engagement machine! — in a world jones-ing for TikTok levels of so-called “digital fentanyl”.
What does this mean, exactly? On the content roll-out side, it means Character.AI-style companions, already a proven winner, if the glut of lawsuits from the loved one’s of addicted users against each company means anything. Culture war content carefully calibrated to your specific emotional triggers and AI-generated “hot takes” — a world where AI itself has a say in the zeitgeist. And then there’s data: as users become less inhibited, they will feed Meta even more data about their preferences.
As we’ve seen with platforms like Gab, and even to some extent X, less moderation doesn’t only drive engagement, it increases administrative headaches. Some moderation is good and keeps people in check. Without it, you risk poisoning the well by increasing polarisation to almost comical degrees and creating an echo chamber. An echo chamber that’s no longer a haven for free speech or a hot spot for debate, no matter how meaningless those debates are, but irritating to ordinary users. In other words, its own form of “slop”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI don’t trust Facebook. And never will.
I don’t trust anything I receive, via any form of media! Not on its own asserted merit alone, at least.
I wonder what the ladies exchanging family photos on Facebook will think about AI integration.
But the big problem on social media over the past few years has been government censorship courtesy of the well-trained experts in the Intelligence Community, and telling Zuck: “nice little business you got here…” That’s what we learned from The Twitter Files.
But I am sure that I can trust my lefty and wokey friends to pull out all the stops on countering Trump Lies and other abominations. So no censorship for a while.
I only use Facebook to check on the background of people I am interested in using my wife’s Facebook. Her feed is full of family holiday photos and what people have been up to and other anodyne stuff rather than controversy. However, she was scammed following some alleged supermarket come on. I trust Facebook will not be standing back and letting scams run riot without check.
Google Translate translated “Character.AI-style companion” as “Character.AI-style tovarisch”
.
This is amazing!
There appears to be a lot of AI generated pages currently on Facebook. Many reposting similar items with unusual page names and several of them have obvious errors. All done as the article says to increase personal engagement, since friends now hardly ever post.
What freaked me out was five years ago or so I had a really slow and old computer. It took minutes to load pages from the net, but it kept me informed what it was doing with little messages at the bottom left of the screen.
The first thing Windows did when loading any page was connect to Facebook, which I didn’t have open, to send and receive information, presumably what I was doing on the computer.
I never have Faceb9ok installed now. But no doubt all my computer actuvity still gets sent there, including this message.