“It’s cool, bro, just chill” is the official guiding principle of Neo-Facebook
Previously: Zuckerberg has a Golden Opportunity to Rebrand His Twitter Clone as “The Free Speech Alternative to Twitter”
There could only be a showdown with Facebook if the US government allowed Europe to have such a showdown. Europe does not have independent policies, all of them are dictated to them by the United States. Obviously, they have stricter speech rules than the US (at least technically), but those rules are all driven by the US desire to shut down speech globally.
Just look at the way the Germans have gone along with supporting Ukraine terrorism against their country, gone along with collapsing their own industrial sector, because the US tells them to do that. It’s ridiculous and humiliating.
However, US organs at the State Department probably do not agree with Donald Trump easing the restrictions on speech rules in America, and they will likely use European bodies to attack those changes.
Sweeping changes to the policing of Meta’s social media platforms have set the tech company on a collision course with legislators in the UK and the European Union, experts and political figures have said.Lawmakers in Brussels and London criticised Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to scrap factcheckers in the US for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, with one labelling it “quite frightening”.
The changes to Meta’s global policies on hateful content now include allowing users to call transgender people “it”, with the guidelines stating: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.”
Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP and chair of the science and technology committee for the House of Commons, which is investigating how online disinformation fuelled last summer’s riots, said Zuckerberg’s decision to replace professional factcheckers with users policing the accuracy of posts was “concerning” and “quite frightening”.“To hear that Meta is removing all its factcheckers [in the US] is concerning … people have a right to be protected from the harmful effects of misinformation,” she said. “The fact that Zuckerberg said he’s following the example of X must raise concerns when we compare how X is a platform for misinformation to a greater extent than Facebook has been.”
Chi Onwurah is frightened.
She’s one of the top British people, you know.
People better take her emotions seriously.
Meta’s move, which Zuckerberg made clear was a response to the incoming Donald Trump presidency, also prompted predictions that a major challenge is coming from the Trump administration against laws such as the Online Safety Act.The former UK technology minister, Damian Collins, said such a challenge will “most likely be made through trade negotiations where pressure will be brought against the UK to accept American standards for digital regulation”.
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A Meta whistleblower told the Guardian: “I am extremely concerned about what this means for teenagers.”
Teenagers are useless anyway.
Who cares what happens to them?
Arturo Béjar, a former senior engineer whose responsibilities at Meta included child safety measures, said: “They will be increasingly exposed to all the content categories that they need to be protected against.”Harmful content, including violent or pornographic material, could reach young users more easily, Bejar said, citing Zuckerberg’s statement that tackling “lower severity” transgressions will now rely on users flagging content before Meta acts on it.
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Zuckerberg has said his policy of ditching factcheckers applies only in the US for now, but his broadside against Europe has raised concerns that he is planning to roll out the approach in Europe.
It’s very expensive for these companies to do all of this censorship, which I think is why they’re all excited to stop doing it. With Twitter, it was something like 75% of employees at the company were working in the censorship department.
It’s all ridiculous, and hopefully we’re getting to the point where we can ask about personal responsibility, and start asking if it is possible for the government to view people as adults who are capable of making their own decisions.
Obviously, the idea that the government would view its citizens as adults capable of making decisions is far outside of established norms in the current year, with the government having moved to treat everyone like a little baby. Clearly, everyone in the government prefers to have strict policies that allow them to control what people think and do.
