By Daisy White

“Corporate culture swung towards a more neutered thing”

These are the words from the Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his recent podcast with Joe Rogan where they discussed his new MAGA content moderation changes. During this podcast we watch two men trying to justify Meta’s new reforms that are undeniably harmful to marginalized groups. Zuckerburg’s appearance on Rogan’s podcast can be seen as a final confirmation of his sellout to the Trump administration accompanied by his recent changes to Meta content moderation that perfectly suit Trump and republican interests. Whilst the two ranted about the lack of masculine energy in corporate culture it just proved the point writer Rebecca Shaw made in an article questioning “what could be more masculine and cool than selling out vulnerable communities and women to impress the alpha male?”.

Meta content moderation announcement video:

 Included in this reform to tackle unintentional censorship Mark reveals plans to ‘replace fact-checkers with community notes’ and updates to their hateful conduct policies which include ‘simplifying content policies and new approach to policy enforcement’. This allows for increased hate speech towards vulnerable minorities which is attributed to Zuckerburg’s new MAGA makeover and a desperate attempt at joining Trump’s existing tech oligarchy. As an example, under these new policies, it is now permitted to refer to women as ‘household objects’ on Meta apps. Whilst announcing these new policies he notes ‘the reality is that this is a trade-off, it means we are going to catch less bad stuff but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down’. So by ‘bad stuff’ he means hate speech, misinformation, propaganda, and more, which will now go fully unregulated across all meta platforms. Misinformation and hate speech only accelerate political polarization, an example of this is “In 2017, Amnesty International found that Meta’s algorithms and lack of content moderation substantially contributed to helping foment violence in Myanmar against the Rohingya people” time. Therefore, with these new changes, we can expect even more of this.

Growing exploitation of women on Meta platforms

The impact of these changes will undoubtedly result in Meta’s social media platforms becoming increasingly insecure for women. Naturally, Meta will begin to push more right-wing content on users due to its relationship with Trump, this will not only bolster support for Trump but continue to polarize and brainwash users. Another associated issue is Meta’s reluctance to remove adult content, namely AI-generated nudes. Across Meta platforms there’s been growing awareness that users explore pages are consistently showing them content unrelated to their searches and instead ads that exploit women. One report found that ‘An AI app for generating nonconsensual nude images and videos of anyone receives the majority of its traffic from Meta platforms’ as well as this, they also found the app is buying thousands of explicit ads featuring these nonconsensual nudes of popular celebrities and influencers. Therefore, directly making Meta platforms more insecure for women and putting them at serious risk.

Zuckerberg’s new endorsement of Trump

Zuckerburg announced he would be moving the content moderation teams from California to Texas as this is a place with “less concern about the bias of their team”. Texas is a majority Republican state, so concerning the team’s ‘bias,’ I think it’s safe to say there will certainly be one. Only this bias will again, same as the other changes, create more insecurity online for women and marginalized groups. Having a right-wing content moderation team essentially speaks for itself and will endanger the authenticity and validity of content on meta. If right-wing media and propaganda are being pushed the effects are certainly harmful. So, between both Zuckerberg’s Meta announcement video and his podcast with Joe Rogan we’ve observed his last-minute desperate attempt to prove his own masculinity and to join Trump’s ‘tech bros’ and in doing so, throwing vulnerable people under the bus. It is certainly a switch around as in 2021 on January 7^th Facebook banned Donald Trump with Zuckerburg saying “the risks of Mr.Trump using the service were too great” so his new endorsement comes across as cowardly as he threw aside his past values, whether out of fear of the Trump administration or simply because he felt excluded we don’t know. However, we do know that this will have a substantial impact on marginalized groups that are targeted on Meta platforms through hate speech, propaganda, and more.