Zuckerberg’s New Meta: It’s Finally Time to Leave Social Media

It is, once again, time for me to sound the alarm and tell you that the end is nigh. As the self-appointed horsewoman of the social media apocalypse, this time I'm telling you that it's officially time to get out. Delete your accounts, get yourself back into the real world and experience the Outernet again. It's over, it's done — social media is officially a desolate wasteland that will only make you less informed and mentally unwell.

I used to think stopping social media use was something that's mainly beneficial to the individual — you'll be happier and you'll eliminate a massive time sink, leaving you with more time to actually connect with the people around you and do something useful with your time. Spending your days getting angry on Twitter or looking at AI-generated slop and interacting with chatbots on Facebook just seems so useless, I don't know why any one of us would do that for fun. This time, though, I'm convinced that the benefits of us leaving social media are societal.

Meta just released an announcement that put the final nail in the coffin for social media having any sort of informative use. Mark Zuckerberg just announced in a video that Meta will be getting rid of fact-checkers and pushing more political content on its users. Fact-checkers will be replaced with "community notes similar to X" and Meta will loosen their moderation policies and remove restrictions around the topics of "immigration, gender identity and gender" as Meta will restore "free expression". This is a part of their larger foray into politics, and The Zuck cites Trump as a major reason for Meta undergoing these changes.

If you're anything like me, I know what you're thinking: Fuck.

Every time one of these tech bros starts yammering on about freedom of expression, I want to ask them to define it. Please define for me the term "free speech". Because they all seem to think that it means "anyone can say anything forever!" — it doesn't. Free speech means "the right to express information, ideas, and opinions free of government restrictions," notice how there's a load-bearing word there: governments. Last I checked, Facebook, Instagram and Threads were not the government.

When social media companies like Facebook or Twitter set out terms in their user agreements, it's to make the user experience more enjoyable for consumers. It's not because there's a law saying they must limit what people can say, it's because most of us will stop using websites where we constantly get verbally abused or see hateful content all the time. These are voluntary terms set by a private business that users agree to. Lack of restriction on what you can or cannot say on a social media platform has in itself nothing to do with "free speech."

But there's one interesting example when it comes to free speech on social media. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he similarly waxed poetic about how they will be turning it into a free speech platform. And yet, Twitter has complied with almost every government censorship request they have received since Musk took over. Before that, it was around 50%. So when governments want to restrict the right to express information, ideas, and opinions, Twitter under Musk complies. But hey, at least you can insult people to your heart's content without getting a ban.

It's a curious choice to model their platforms on Twitter/X anyway. After Musk took over the platform, advertisers fled and the company's stock plummeted. It is now worth nearly 80% less than before Musk bought it. The user numbers have gone down by about a third in the past year in the UK and a fifth in the US. So it's probably fair to assume that Meta deciding to model itself on Twitter wasn't exactly strictly speaking a "business decision" — that, or the man who tried to make the Metaverse isn't the great businessman we all thought he was. Take your pick, I say probably a bit of both.

I've always known that Dork Zuckerberg isn't a good person. To find that out, all I had to do was listen to him. When Facebook was still The Facebook, Zuckerberg's prototype Harvard University social networking site, Zuckerberg messaged one of his friends, offering him access to people's emails and social security numbers. His friend asked how he had access to this information, Zuckerberg said "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." Straight from the horse's mouth — you're a dumb fuck if you trust Zuck with your data.

Then there's the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a political data company harvested the personal data of 87 million Facebook users to send people targeted political social media content to influence the way they vote. Facebook users were invited to fill out a personality quiz, log into the app with their Facebook account, and get rewarded anywhere between $2 to $5. This gave Cambridge Analytica access to all of their data on Facebook, along with all the data of the users on the quiz taker's friend list.

The results of this personality quiz, along with the contents of the user's Facebook likes, were used to build psychological profiles. The names and locations of the people who filled in the quiz were then matched with their identities on the electoral register, letting Cambridge Analytica know which party the user was registered to. This data was then used to target individual users with political ads on Facebook based on their political profile, trying to get individuals in swing states to elect Donald Trump. The aim was to "micro-target" individuals with ads that would be most effective in getting them to change their votes, based on their psychological vulnerabilities.

Zuckerberg tried to downplay and deny Facebook's involvement, saying that they only became aware of it when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was in the press, but leaked emails between Facebook employees show that that is untrue. A whistleblower has also said that he had a meeting with one of Facebook's board members and Cambridge Analytica's "contacts with Russian entities."

Zuckerberg says that Meta's platforms are moving away from fact-checking, because "fact-checkers have just been too politically biased". Instead, they will replace full-time fact-checking staff with volunteer contributions from users, modelled on Community Notes on Musk's Twitter. In today's information climate, this is idiotic — unless your aim is to ensure people are more misled and less informed on social media than they already are.

Russia, for example, has been pouring money into influencing elections abroad with cyber electoral interference methods. In the 2016 US Presidential Elections, they targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states, hacked the DNC and published their documents, and hacked Clinton's staff's emails. But in addition to that, they conducted social media campaigns aiming to change the minds of voters through disinformation, manipulation and propaganda.

According to the Mueller Report, part of Russia's social media campaigns consisted of creating fake social media profiles and groups to reach American voters while masquerading as regular American people, focusing their efforts on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. On Facebook, their accounts reached tens of millions of people during the elections, posting content about divisive topics and material that opposed Clinton and supported Trump. They operated groups on Facebook with names like "Being Patriotic," "Stop All Immigrants," "Secured Borders," and "Tea Party News". They also created groups like "LGBT United", "United Muslims of America" and "Blacktivists".

Russia uses a propaganda tactic called the firehose of falsehoods, consisting of "high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions." Employees in Moscow's troll factories are spreading disinformation as a full-time job, and Zuckerberg aims to combat it by having a few willing volunteers say "that's not true!" on each individual post. Obviously that's not going to work. It leaves a space open for social media disinformation to proliferate even faster than it does now. This might be even more of an issue considering that Facebook's user base is older. How well-equipped do we think less tech-savvy elderly people will be when it comes to spotting deepfake audio and video? If you look at the calibre of AI-generated viral photos some boomers are interacting with on Facebook, I think I can confidently say that we're doomed.

I don't think enough of us understand just how prevalent these operations are, and Russia is by no means the only state that is doing it. Operations like these aim to spread disinformation and sow discord, making us more polarised and less informed. Meta's decision to show more political content to everyone without fact-checking it while taking away restrictions on how you can speak about inflammatory topics like gender and immigration is probably the wet dream of some foreign autocrats who are engaged in information warfare.

It's crazy to me that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and their lesser-known cousin Threads, are all now so-called "free speech platforms" run by associates of Donald Trump. Not only did Facebook donate $1 million to Trump's campaign, Zuckerberg's announcement specifically referenced Trump, and comes after Zuckerberg had a personal meeting with him. And obviously Elon Musk of Twitter/X is the dipshit who often bounces around behind him. In addition to that, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, is also now aligning with Trump, and Musk is talking about buying an outlet of the legacy press. If this amount of media control was emerging somewhere else, the same people who are cheering this on would be calling it tyranny.

What's most peculiar is that these people seem hell-bent on running these services to the ground. Musk's Twitter is a dumpster fire, riddled with the most hateful and nasty social media users rallying around their supreme leader while he's tweeting polls about whether or not the US should invade the UK. Why would anyone at Meta want to emulate that? The free speech that Musk preached about also never materialised, as they'll appease any foreign government requesting censorship. Presumably Zuckerberg's free speech havens will do the same.

So, who benefits from this? It's clearly not Meta — if they're modelling themselves after Twitter, you would think their stock price follows Twitter's lead. And it's not us, either. Who of us wants a social media that has more disinformation and more inflammatory speech? I think we're all over it. Remember outside? That place was fun. Let's all go back there. Let's make like Nick Clegg and run as far away from New Meta as possible.

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