Facebook Was Already Zucked

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2:43It's been a shitty week for many obvious reasons, and I challenge you at this time to be kind to yourself and to the people around you. be kinder hold them closer be more supportive say nicer things but specifically to my trans listeners i love you you're loved and accepted fuck these people fuck the executive order i'm so sorry and anyone who agrees with the that eo or is against trans people you can go fuck yourself like i need you to download something else go and do something else with your time i'm not interested in helping you you are not my friend you will never be my friend if you're against trans people, I'm against you.

3:19Anyway, back to the podcast. So I've been back from CES for a week now and I'm finally recovering and I appreciate everybody who listened to the 13 and a half hours of audio we put out. And a big thank you to the whole team there, Edward Ngueso Jr., David Roth, Phil Broughton, Matt Asowski, and everyone else who came along. Now we're back to our regular format and it's likely going to be a rotation between more of the talk radio stuff you heard at CES and then heard with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, and then stuff like this. Spoken word. I'm back, baby. But 2025, it's going to be a chaotic year.

3:52You're going to feel a deficit of hope. I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. The best thing you can do right now is to hold those people you love closer. Treat everyone around you, like I said, a little more kindly. Listen more keenly to the things that people are saying and put your heart and soul into the things you do and the things you do for others. You may not be able to change much at scale, but you can improve your immediate orbit, the bubble around you. Now, in this week's two parter, I'm going to talk to you about the people who choose to do the direct opposite. They use their power or their platform to exploit and hurt people for money, or they use another platform to help maintain the status quo, usually at the cost of other people's happiness.

4:32You see, in the last few weeks we've seen the emergence of what I call the true meta and of course the true Mark Zuckerberg as the company chose to end its fact-checking program in early January claiming that and I quote fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created on both Instagram and Facebook the latter of which is shown in a study from George Washington University to by design and I quote again afford anti-vaccine content produces several means to circumvent the intent of misinformation removal policies. Meta's also killed its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, something that I expect other tech firms to copy, unrestrained by any kind of societal norms under an administration that seems intent on destroying as many of them as possible.

5:16Shortly after announcing the policies, Zuckerberg went on the Joe Rogan experience and had what I would describe as a full-scale piss fit, claiming that corporations are culturally neutered and that companies should have both more masculine energy and have a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more. And then he added that said culture would have its own merits that are really positive. I, none of this means anything. Zuckerberg also believes that the modern corporate culture has somehow framed masculinity as bad, something that he doesn't really attempt to elaborate on or explain or frame with any kind of evidence because he's on the Joe Rogan experience and because he also knows no one's going to fucking ask him.

5:53and it's it's just this kind of directionless grievance and it fills me full of piss and vinegar myself and this means by the way that metten has now and i quote their own announcement gotten rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration gender identity and gender that are subject to frequent political discourse and debate which in practice means that metten now allows you to say that being gay is a mental illness or describe immigrants as filth and as an immigrant, I find that disgusting. I find all of this so fucking disgusting. As I'll get to in this episode, they never really cared that much, but to formalize this stuff is so utterly hurtful.

6:29It's a template for worse people, and Facebook, our meta is right down at the fucking bottom of the barrel. This is going to give other companies something to borrow, and it's just, when I read this stuff. I just, I hear the Perry Mason music from Kill Bill. Anyway, moving on with the episode. Now, surprise here, Casey Newton at Platformer, who I have been deeply critical of and will be very critical of in a later episode, has done a really excellent job reporting on exactly how horrifying these policies are, revealing how Meta's internal guidelines allow Facebook users to say that trans people are both mentally ill and don't exist, which, to be clear, if you're listening to this and saying that you agree with that, I'd like you to stop listening for a second.

7:13I'd like you to get your car keys. I'd like you to close your garage door and I'd like you to start the fucking ignition just in case it's really, it's not clear enough how I feel about anti-trans people. And it also included one of the most wretched things I've ever read. Alex Schultz, Meta's CMO, who is a gay man, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights. This is, and I don't say this lightly, one of the most disgusting and offensive and stupid things I've ever heard a tech executive say.

7:47But let's be abundantly clear, this is exactly the kind of social network that Mark Zuckerberg wants. An unrestrained, unfiltered, unrepentantly toxic and noxiously heteronormative one, untethered by the frustrating norms of making sure that a social network of billions of people doesn't actively encourage hate of multiple different marginalized groups and i am so angry about this because it's all so needless it's all so needless but everything everything has to be thrown into the fire for growth that's who these fucking people are but but dear listener don't worry mark zuckerberg he's finally free finally mark zuckerberg ceo and founder of meta can do whatever he wants as opposed to the past 20 years where it's hard to argue that he's one of the most, if not the single most punished man alive.

8:34You see, Marky Mark's net worth recently hit$213 billion. He's running a company with a market capitalization of$1.5 trillion, and he can never be fired from it. He even owns a 1 ,400 acre compound in Hawaii. And while dealing with all of this suffering, he had to once, sorry, I mean twice, sit in front of a Senate hearing and lazily apologize for something non-specifically. He was tortured, tortured only six years after having done it last. I am being very sarcastic, obviously. This man has not suffered, I don't want to say, the next part of that sentence, but he's not suffered at all. He's had the easiest go of it, just like the rest of these fucking people.

9:16Few living people have had it easier than Mark Zuckerberg. He's a man insulated from consequence, risk, and responsibility, and he has been for like 20 years. The sudden and warranted alarm to this, by the way. And I will say the media has acted with enough alarm here. It has this air of surprise though. It frames Meta and Mark Zuckerberg like they just suddenly were like, hmm, what if we were super bigoted? What if our new network could, uh, if, what if it could be more racist? We need to please Donald Trump because that's not what Meta has been doing before, right? They've never been. Well, we'll get to that in a bit, but I kind of want to take you back in memory lane a bit.

10:01A long time ago, by which I mean August 2024, the people in the media today saying, oh wow, Mark Zuckerberg has suddenly gone conservative. He's suddenly right wing. Me months ago, they were fawning over this guy. They were fawning over his new look. They were desperate to hear about his gold chains and why he was wearing them, and they declared that he had the swagger of a Roman emperor, and that he had, and I quote the Washington Post here, transformed himself from a dorky democracy-destroying CEO into a dripped-out, jacked AI accelerationist in the eyes of potential meta-recruits. Zuckerberg was, until these last few weeks, being celebrated for the very thing that people are upset about right now.

10:42Flimsy, self-conscious, and performative macho bullshit that only signifies strength to weak men, and those credulous enough to accept it which in this case means almost every media out there the only difference between then when mark was with his chains and his big baggy t-shirt and he looked like heaven fed line and now is that mark zuckerberg has finally decided to be honest after all where was the punishment or judgment for his last macho media bullshit if anything it kind of proved that anyone will accept anything that mark zuckerberg does at all yet i really want to be clear that what we're seeing with meta and by extension zark is not sudden at all it's the direct result of a man that has never ever ever been held in check it's utter fantasy to describe or even hint that these changes are the beginning of some sort of unrestrained meta rather than part of the intentional destruction of this product and all of their products in the market leader of rot economics this is the rot economy this is everything I've been telling you about.

11:43Growth at all costs, except the costs now are the safety of trans people, the safety of LGBTQ people, the safety of immigrants. This hostile network that was already pretty hostile, and I will get to that, is now basically saying, thumbs up, go nuts, be as bigoted as you're fucking one. It's disgraceful. And as I said in the middle of last year, Meta spent years gradually making the experience of its products worse in pursuit of perpetual growth. And if you go back to the people destroying Facebook, that podcast episode, that was actually from Mark Zuckerberg. You wanted something like 12 to 14 % perpetual year-over-year growth.

12:19Insane stuff. But when I say intentionally, I mean the product decisions, like limiting the information and notifications as a means of making users click more and go around the page rather than, I don't know, being notified of something and knowing something, or heavily promoting clickbait articles. This was all to keep people on the site longer. And they've been doing it for years. in broad daylight. And it's led to this deterioration of Facebook and soon Instagram that is just disgraceful, but not as disgraceful as formalizing horrible hate-filled policies. And some are touting Zuckerberg's current move as some sort of master plan to appease Donald Trump and the conservatives.

12:56And they're suggesting that this is a magnification of these platforms, where conservatives will somehow be given, I don't know, preferential treatment perhaps, perhaps maybe like Facebook's algorithm. It could promote more conservative content. Man, wouldn't that be really bad? Wouldn't it be bad if Facebook's algorithm was intentionally and repeatedly recommending conservative content? It's been doing it for fucking years. Why are we pretending like this is new? Why is everyone acting like this is new? I'm going insane. I'm actually going insane because the actual problems here have been there a while.

13:28The only thing that's changed is they formalized them. And I am so angry in this episode because I can't leave these people unaccountable. I cannot have people that wrote about this pretend like this is new, like this is sudden. It's time for everyone in the media to take a little bit of fucking responsibility for what we've done.

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17:00But give me a second though. I actually want to lead you through someone who did a pretty good job. And you're not going to believe me, but it's Kevin Roos of the New York Times. You see, in 2020, Roos created an automated Twitter account called Facebook's Top 10, listing the top-performing posts, so what posts were shared, viewed, and commented on the most on Facebook, by US Facebook pages, and he posted it on a daily basis. He was able to do this using something called CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool provided by Facebook specifically for researchers and journalists to understand what was happening on the world's largest social network at the time.

17:35Roos' reporting revealed that Meta's top-performing links regularly skewed toward right-wing influencers like Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and Sean Hannity, as well as outlets like Fox News and the page of then-president and, I guess, now-president Donald Trump. Internally, Meta was kind of freaking out, suggesting that Roos wasn't really getting what it meant, because engagement was a misleading measurement of what was popular on Facebook. They suggested that the real litmus test was something called reach, as in how many people actually saw a post. Roos also reported that the internal arguments at Meta led it to suggest it'd make a separate Twitter account of its own that had what they would call a more balanced view of its internal data, which 100 % makes sense.

18:17Meta even suggested the obvious answer, sharing reach data, as in, again, how many people actually saw a post, and that this would somehow vindicate their position. One nasty little detail, though. CrowdTangle's CEO told them that, well, false and misleading news stories also rise to the top of the reach list. In simpler terms, they didn't share the reach data because it would prove that Facebook was, in fact, a misinformation machine. The reporting around CrowdTangle, though, danced around an important detail. They were just talking about posts, and you know, these are just the posts that happen to be on Facebook, right?

18:52It just happens that Dan Bongino got to the top all of these times. How did that happen? Well, let me tell you how it fucking happened. They were likely recommended by Facebook's algorithm, which is reliably and repeatedly skewed conservative for years. A study in The Economist from September 2020 found that the most popular American media outlets on Facebook in a one-month period were Breitbart and Fox News, and that both Facebook page engagements and website views heavily skewed conservative. This is quite old. This has been happening a while. While one could argue that this might just be the will of the users, what a user sees on Facebook is almost entirely algorithmic now, and it certainly was back then.

19:28And it's reasonable to assume that said algorithm was deliberately pushing conservative content. At this time, Metta's head of public policy was Joel Kaplan, a man whose previous work involved working as George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff for policy, as well as handling public policy and affairs for Energy Future Holdings. Really fucked up little story for you. This was a company, a private equity firm, kind of catamari situation, which bought up a giant Texas power company called TXU for$45 billion, and then immediately steered it into bankruptcy due to the$38.7 billion in debt that Energy Future Holdings was forced to take on as a means of acquiring the power company.

20:06It's private equity again. It's always fucking private equity. Jesus Christ. Anyway, this is the now the policy head at Meta, and he has been for years. It's all very good. Anyway, Jeff Horwitz reported in his wonderful book Broken Code that Kaplan personally intervened when Facebook's health team attempted to remove COVID conspiracy movie Plandemic from its recommendation engine, and Facebook only did so once Kevin Roos reported that it was the most engaged link in a 24-hour period. Naturally, Meta's choice wasn't to fix things or improve things or take responsibility or issue a comment saying, huh, we're going to look into the conservative thing.

20:41No, no, no. Why would they do that? By the end of 2021, Meta had disbanded the entire CrowdTangle team. And in early 2022, the company had stopped registering new users for CrowdTangle. In early 2024, months before the 2024 elections, CrowdTangle was shut down entirely, though Facebook top 10 had stopped working in the middle of 2023. three. What I'm getting at is that Meta hasn't made a right-wing turn. Meta has been an active arm of the right-wing media for nearly a decade, actively empowering noxious, horrifying creatures like Alex Jones, allowing him to evade bans and build massive private online groups on the platform so that he could still send his shit out even when he was banned.

21:20A report from November 2021 by Media Matters found that Facebook had tweaked its news algorithm in 2021 to help right-leaning news and political pages to outperform other pages using, and I quote, sensational and divisive content. Another Media Matters report from 2023 found that conservatives were continually earning more total interactions than left or non-aligned pages between January 1st, 2020 and December 31st, 2022, even as the company was actively deprioritizing political content, by which I mean the algorithm was, allegedly, showing you less politics. Unless, of course, you were conservative.

21:55A report from last year from non-profit GLAAD found that Meta had continually allowed widespread anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook and Threads, with the company either claiming that the content didn't violate its community standards or just ignoring the reports entirely. while we can and should actively decry disgraceful new policies. It's kind of ahistorical to pretend that this company gave a shit in the past or took it seriously or just that they cared. And this pisses me off because if we act now like they've changed, they don't get held accountable at all. But then again, did they before?

22:35Have they ever been held accountable? I don't know. The answer is no, by the way. there are reporters who have done really good work on this ruse kevin russell have given a lot of shit he did some really great reporting on crowd tank or jeff horwitz from the wall street journal along with the other team who did the facebook files which get to later there are people doing great work the problem is there's just this kind of weak and inconsistent approach that the media has taken to meta and to mark zuckerberg and none of these changes none of these things that i'm saying here are particularly hard to find if you look this up you could say hey look exactly as i am right now.

23:09Hey, this doesn't seem to be a new policy. This just seems to be them deciding to formalize their lack of effort to protect trans people, their lack of effort to stop conservative demagogues doing stuff. I mean, it's just, it's frustrating. It's frustrating and annoying. And seeing them formalize it fills me full of poison in my veins. It's just, it's hateful. It's racist, it's violent, it's cruel, it's bigoted. And it's how it's been for so long. Why are we not just able to call these people what they are? And they really will do whatever they want to or need to for growth. And I'm going to quote something here.

23:51I'm going to quote Facebook's old vice president, Andrew Bosworth, from an internal email from 2017 I may have mentioned before. And I quote, All the work that Facebook does in growth is justified. even if it's bullying or a terrorist attack carried out on their platform. And yes, that's exactly what he said, by the way. And you'd think a guy who's like, yeah, you know, growth, just we need to grow at all costs. And indeed, if something bad happens as a result, at least we connected people. You'd think that a letter like that getting out in 2017, that would lead to him being probably put in a naughty box, right?

24:25He wouldn't get promoted, would he? He wouldn't become the chief technology officer, would he? Because that's what Andrew Bosworth is now. this is what this company is it's time to stop pretending that meta was ever something noble or good or well-meaning mark zuckerberg is a repressed coward as far from manly as one can get because true masculinity if you can even fully i don't even know if you can really give it a full definition but i will tell you what is masculine it's a sense of responsibility for both oneself and others and the things that we do and finding strength in supporting and uplifting those close to you and loving more and caring more for people.

25:04I don't really want to put down a hard and fast one, but that's part of what masculinity is for me. It isn't being a fucking crybaby billionaire going on Joe Rogan going, where? Oh, the company's not masculine enough. Coward, coward motherfucker. It's disgusting. And Meta as an institution has been rotten for years, making trillions of dollars as it continually makes their services work, all to force users to spend more time on the site, even if it's because Facebook and Instagram are now engineered to interrupt everything you're doing, your decision-making, your autonomy, with a constant slew of different forms of sponsored and algorithmically curated crap.