The New Zuckerberg

23:19Usher in an internet where everyone was always competing for attention, where the people who won that competition wouldn't need to tell the truth or challenge your existing beliefs or even be sane. That actually, those attributes would just serve to slow you down. Sometimes I wonder if these questions we periodically ask, about whether meta should be run to please liberals or conservatives, offer more free speech or less misinformation, if all that doesn't miss the better question, do we actually want these social media platforms at all? But I digress. To return to our story, by 2013, the future is coming into focus.

23:57Facebook has gone public, reached a billion users, and acquired Instagram. And Mark Zuckerberg, who, remember, dropped out of college to build a website, a guy who, despite all his success, spent most of his time working in an office in California, he starts to look outwards. What problems could he solve in this world with all the money and power he's earned? What does he believe in? Here's Times reporter Mike Isaac. There's these issues that as he grows up under the spotlight, you know, he goes from early 20s to mid-20s. Yeah. He starts figuring out things that he might start to care about. Okay, like, and often that's through the filter of friends and people around him.

24:42This Mark Zuckerberg is an idealist. The words Mike uses are optimistic and naive about what it will mean to try to change the world for the better. He looks at education, disease prevention, and most notably, immigration reform. He makes friends with a man named Jose Antonio Vargas. Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and activist. Someone who had come out publicly as an unauthorized immigrant. Zuckerberg decides he wants to help people like Vargas succeed in America. Here's Zuckerberg in 2013 talking to journalist James Bennett, who seems a little incredulous that Mark Zuckerberg thinks he can troubleshoot one of the most intractable issues in American society.

25:21So you were up on the Hill today. You met with House Republicans, I think, to talk about this. I wonder what your level of optimism is about actually getting something done in the short term. Well, you know, I'm optimistic, but I'm an entrepreneur, right? I mean, you don't go off and try to build something crazy if you're not optimistic fundamentally about the world. Zuckerberg says he's already been talking to politicians about comprehensive immigration reform. He says across the aisle, people are interested in fixing the problem, finding a path to citizenship. I mean, I've only encountered people who seem like they have good intentions and want to move this forward.

26:02and care about the people in their districts. And what we're trying to do with 4.us is, I mean, obviously we're not writing the law, right? I mean, all these folks know way more about the sensitivities than we do. We just want to be there to help support folks who are going to have to take challenging positions on something that's going to be controversial, but they ultimately believe is the right thing. So that's why we're here and what we're going to try to do to help out.

26:28Mike Isaac says that this is another version of Zuckerberg he can remember once existing. A guy with a surprising amount of faith in the American political process. What I've heard, what people I've talked to, there was this earnest view of the world, or at least of Washington, where if I can go in and explain my views to these people in Congress, I will be able to have a sort of rigorous intellectual debate. And like, maybe we disagree on things, but we can sort of have that discourse. There are obviously he has enough paid Washington folks around him who find that idea absurd, but they're not going to tell the boss you are wildly naive and you have not come to the level of cynicism that you need to engage in Washington.

27:14But I think that that probably explains the early years of some of these initiatives.

27:25After the break, the cruel world conspires to break the heart of an idealistic billionaire. And the path to Trump begins.

27:49Thank you.

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30:36December 1st, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg's first daughter is born. To mark the day, he posts on Facebook a letter he and his wife have written to her. It's a glimpse of how Mark Zuckerberg, in that moment, sees things. He says that the world is getting better, even if the news focuses on what's wrong. But he lists some of the problems that still need solving. Quote, If you fear you'll go to prison rather than college because of the color of your skin, or that your family will be deported because of your legal status, or that you may be a victim of violence because of your religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity, then it's difficult to reach your full potential.

31:15And in the same post, Mark Zuckerberg makes a startling announcement. He promises most of his wealth at the time, about$45 billion, to a new organization he's starting with his wife, dedicated to making the world a better place. His wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is a pretty extraordinary character in her own right, a first-generation American, the daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, first in her immediate family to go to college, Harvard, where she'd volunteered at housing projects five days a week while studying to become a pediatrician. Chan and her story seem obviously to have influenced her husband.

31:49Their new organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, its priorities will include immigration reform and education. The view here seems to be Obama-era liberal, that life is fundamentally unfair and that those who have succeeded have a responsibility to try to iron out that unfairness for everybody else. Again, this is 2015. Ten years from now, Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting the inauguration party for a president whose political priorities include mass deportations and tax cuts for billionaires. But that's now. This was then. Mike Isaac, the New York Times reporter, has spent a lot of time reporting on the factors behind Zuckerberg's shift.

32:30We're going to walk you through them. Starting with factor number one, 2016. Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton and the country's reaction to that victory. Democracy itself, in the most powerful nation on earth, may have been undermined by fake news. President-elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump. Immediately, there's a slew of articles basically pointing at Facebook saying this has to be the reason that Donald Trump was elected. During the election season, Facebook was paid at least$100 ,000 by Russian troll farms for advertising. You know, it's funny now because, like, this is still seen as like an aberration in democracy, right?

33:12Like, there's no way that the American people could have elected Donald Trump. This had to be manipulation from foreign governments. This had to be the spread of disinformation across Facebook. And like, look, those things did happen, do happen, right? But that was like the only way people could accept that this happened in their minds. Facebook has come under fire recently for its role in last year's election. Reports have surfaced showing the social networking site was a breeding ground for misinformation. All the guns turn on Zuckerberg and Facebook on both sides of the aisle. The Republicans were already going after him, but the Democrats are now looking at him.

33:50So he has no friends. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. 2018, Zuckerberg has to go to Washington to both the Senate and the House to answer for both the election and his latest privacy scandal. Zuckerberg will try to explain how a data mining company got a hold of information from 87 million Facebook users. Congress will also press for details on how Russians used fake accounts. Chairman Grassley, Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Feinstein and Ranking Member Nelson and members of the committee. Mark Zuckerberg in a navy blue suit, light blue tie, ancient Roman hairstyle.

34:27The hoodie's gone. He's 33, looks the part of a young CEO. His eyes are wide open and fixed, like the big blink you take after putting in a contact lens. We face a number of important issues around privacy, safety, and democracy. And you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer. This was, I would say, the period where they were trying to fix it, and I think in an earnest attempt. Now, there's limits to that later on, but I think this was like the, okay, we messed up, how do we fix it sort of period. But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.

35:05And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I think he saw it as a kind of penance that he had to do and say, like, look, I'm going to come, I'm going to explain myself in good faith again because that's what we're doing, and I can point to the literal billions of dollars and many thousands of people we've hired to fix this problem, and then you will all understand, of course. And what happens instead?

35:43They do not understand.

35:48Or look, they may understand and they don't give a shit anyway. You know, like it's the level of cynicism of Washington. Like, look, I'm not saying Zuckerberg was right. I'm not saying he came to the Hill with the correct point of view. But I think to the degree that I'm aware of his mentality, he thought that going and explaining what they were doing would solve some of these problems. And it didn't. Mr. Zuckerberg, I remember well your first visit to Capitol Hill back in 2010. This is an exchange that would become somewhat legendary. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, 84 at the time, meaning that the cutting-edge technology of his college years would have been the color television.

36:26You spoke to the Senate Republican High Tech Task Force, which I chair. You said back then that Facebook would always be free. Is that still your objective? Senator, yes, there will always be a version of Facebook that is free. It is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and to bring the world closer together. In order to do that, we believe that we need to offer a service that everyone can afford, and we're committed to doing that. Well, if so, how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service? Senator, we run ads. I see. Zuckerberg's like sort of pithy response.

37:06That becomes a meme in Silicon Valley or at Menlo Park where his headquarters is. They make little stickers that say, Senator, we sell ads, making fun of Congress. And that senator in particular placed them all over their laptops and stuff. It's like this moment of kind of almost contempt because you're supposed to be having this, you know, high minded, elevated discussion. And instead, these people he doesn't even want to talk to show up completely unprepared in his eyes to give this level of questioning. These hearings, not all the questioning is unreasonable. Some of it's sharp. But there is a lot that runs from confused grandparent not understanding Internet to confused, somewhat angry grandparent also not understanding Internet.

37:51Here's what everybody's been trying to tell you today. And I say this gently. your user agreement sucks. Republican John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana choosing to use his time on the floor as he sees fit. I'm going to suggest to you that you go back home and rewrite it and tell your$1 ,200 an hour lawyers, no disrespect, they're good. But tell them you want it written in English and non-Swahili. There's so much political theater going on in any congressional hearing And a lot of it is, if you watch any one of these, one senator or one congressperson will get, you know, a couple of minutes to yell at a CEO on their pet issue and carve that up into 30 -second soundbites.

38:41Then they can then distribute to their constituents on social media to prove that their congressperson is worth being in Congress, right? So the goal of a hearing a lot of the times is not to get anywhere substantive. It's just to flog someone in public. There's, of course, an irony here. Mark Zuckerberg showing up again and again to Capitol Hill, imagining he's going to have substantive conversations with these politicians, who instead are just trying to make short, good clips for the gram. Meaning he was a victim here of dynamics amplified by his own social media platform. Dynamics his businesses in some ways relied on.

39:23Mike says for years, somehow, it was like Mark Zuckerberg was unable to grasp the underlying reality. He thought these politicians wanted conversation, that the right set of words in the right order might allow him to be understood. But Mike says by 2020, even Mark Zuckerberg had become disabused of the naivete that permitted him to believe that American politicians wanted to understand or work with him. And if Zuckerberg's faith in the system was reaching a bottom then, something else was about to happen to help him find newer depths. The next factor in Zuckerberg's path towards Trump, the pandemic.

40:03So COVID hits in 2020. Everyone goes through crisis mode, obviously. The tech industry has to reconfigure how it works. People are being forced indoors and flocking online to these different websites like his in record numbers. I had this one phone call with him on the record where he's like, yeah, we're just fighting to keep the lights on over here because people are on Facebook and Instagram and all this shit like in record numbers, like their servers are on fire. Oh, so they just have like the engineering problem of like Taylor Swift ticket day. But for Facebook, all of a sudden a website that's existed at this point for 16 years.

40:37All day, every day. Yes. This is also the days where either we don't know a lot about COVID and how the spread of it works or what the virus does or what the vaccine does or what the cure is or whatever. Right. And like Zuckerberg says later that he starts getting really hammered by the Biden administration. Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. What Mike's referring to there is some recent interviews Zuckerberg has given. For instance, last week's with Joe Rogan, where he talks quite candidly about how frustrating it was to run a social media company during the COVID era.

41:15In his Rogan appearance, it's clearly the new Zuckerberg, the same one who took to Instagram Reels to change his moderation policies. But listening to the conversation's three-hour sprawl, I got a clearer sense of the guy. And it helped me begin to answer a question I and a lot of people have been having lately. How are these tech CEOs finding a new home in MAGA land in the Big Ten anti-wokeism that Joe Rogan represents? I've listened to a lot of Zuckerberg interviews. And with Rogan, there's a quality I've never before detected. He sounds comfortable. They talk like two newish friends, each with some small influence on the other.

41:57Zuck gets compliments about his Brazilian jiu-jitsu training. I walked in here today. You look thicker. You look like a different guy. You do. You look like a jiu-jitsu guy now. It's funny. I saw your neck. I'm like, his neck's bigger. Your neck is bigger. Good. Joe learns about a zombie-hunting VR game he might like. My zombie game is Arizona Sunshine. Oh, what's that one? Oh, it's, you just like, it can be multiplayer, and there's horde mode where you just get in there, and... It's a Rogan interview, so you get, honestly, everything. Sports injuries, peptides, AI safety, a late interview pee break.

42:30For our purposes today, though, what sticks out is how fired up this new Mark Zuckerberg sounds when he talks about what it was like running Facebook during COVID. How at first he didn't mind censoring what he considered obviously dangerous information, but how that began to change. I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of COVID. It seemed like, OK, you have this virus. It seems like it's killing a lot of people. I don't know. We didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be. So at the beginning, it kind of seemed like, okay, we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this.

43:04But when it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve to, you know, in like in the beginning, it was like, okay, there aren't enough masks. Masks aren't that important to them. It's like, oh, no, you have to wear a mask. And, you know, like everything was shifting around. It's become very difficult to kind of follow. And this really hit the most extreme, I'd say, during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. And I'm generally pretty pro rolling out vaccines. I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative. But I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it.

43:52And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true, right? I mean, they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down. And I was just like, well, we're not going to do that. Like, we're clearly not going to do that. I mean, that is kind of inarguably true. Who is they? Who's telling you to take down things that have the people? Yeah, it was people. It was people in the Biden administration. I think it was... Zuckerberg's story is that COVID is what ultimately changed him. That he couldn't believe that he, a tech CEO, had had to explain the First Amendment to the U.S.

44:36government. It's right there in the country's terms of service. That's the story he tells Rogan. It might be entirely true. It could be partly strategic. Where I'm sure I believe him is when he expresses how little faith he has left in our traditional institutions. The government, the media. He talks a lot about how legacy media will be gone soon, replaced, he hopes, by independent creators like Rogan. It's clear he cannot wait. And since then, I think generally trust in media has fallen off a cliff, right? So I don't think I'm alone in that journey. I think that's basically the experience that a lot of people have had is, OK, it's the stuff that's being written about is not kind of all accurate.

45:17And even if the facts are right, it's kind of written from a slant a lot of the time. Of course. And then there was the government version of it, which is during COVID, which is OK. Like, it's like our government is telling us that we need to censor true things. It's like, this is a disaster. So that's factor two, COVID. And there's another factor that emerged around the same time. Factor three, the circular firing squad. There's this political science term for Americans who basically identify as liberals, but who find other liberals deeply annoying. They're called liberals, meaning life anywhere left of center in this country means often being annoyed or even enraged by the people you theoretically have the most in common with.

46:02But some of those annoyed people stay in the coalition, and others defect. And the old Mark Zuckerberg had seemed able to tolerate progressive allies who often viewed him with extreme suspicion. Take his philanthropic initiative, the one that he and his wife had set up to spend tens of billions of their own dollars to try to solve the world's most intractable problems. Even back when he'd announced it, some critics had accused him of doing the whole thing as some kind of elaborate tax dodge. I mean, on a really base level for him and for Priscilla, I think there's part of it where they're like, we are billionaires trying to give away all of our money to you and you're still giving me the middle finger.

46:45What is that about? Right? Like, there's a lot of how are you being this ungrateful or spiteful or like me clearly trying to do what I think is the right thing and still not, like I can't win sort of thing. I try to be a correctly behaving, selfless billionaire. And you say that instead, it's all me being manipulative or trying to make this work to my ends. So why even try in some of these regards? All this Facebook money was being viewed suspiciously in progressive circles. Noses were turned up. And at other times, being aligned with more polarizing causes would get meta in trouble. For instance, all the work they'd done on immigration reform did not make them a lot of friends in Trump's first administration.

47:29So Mark Zuckerberg evolved. And the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative went from a place trying to solve some of the world's thorniest problems to a place that chose causes not connected to any of our country's eight or nine ongoing culture wars. As CZI, their philanthropic arm, sort of grows in Dobbs came and struck down Roe v. Wade, there were folks inside who wanted to make a strong stand against that and focus on giving money to abortion aid across different states in the country. and there was a moment where Priscilla internally sent a memo saying, our mission is not to focus on this. We need to focus on other things.

48:08Like basically any throw a dart at like the dartboard of contentious social issues of our time. And they were like, we do not want to touch that shit anymore. Let's focus on STEM and science and cancer research and eliminating all disease is the thing he likes to say. Right. And that, I think, is the thing they shifted more toward as they had to worry about, you know, does this put a political target on our back? The same hot cultural winds causing Zuckerberg to think about his philanthropy more carefully were making life more complicated inside Meta. Meta employees had started to have their own fights about free speech within the company, what people should say, what they shouldn't, what they had to.

48:50There'd been this incident years earlier in 2016, where Mark Zuckerberg had reprimanded an anonymous employee who'd crossed out the words Black Lives Matter on a chalkboard at Facebook and written over them, All Lives Matter. Zuckerberg reprimanding the employee was unusual for him, since it amounted, in a sense, to real-life speech moderation. And it set an expectation for his employees about his values that actually made it trickier to navigate what would happen just a few years later, in 2020, the era of the George Floyd protests. When internally people were speaking out about it, obviously, but like what would happen would be some employees would go after other employees for saying you're not speaking out in the way I would like you to, right?

49:36Or you're not being vocal enough, you're not tweeting about it, you're not posting about it or whatever. And I think any reasonable person could have a discussion whether you think that's okay or not, right? Like, I think that's fine to argue. But it ended up in this really contentious point inside of Facebook where, you know, the company endorsed it at one point, but what are the limits of that? Where should they intervene and say you're not allowed to say this anymore? And Zuckerberg in particular, I think it bothers him to be like, okay, well, do, and I'm putting words in his mouth, but do the wokest sort of have the right to tell me what I should or shouldn't be saying publicly?

50:14And this is the thing that sort of bothers me now about the way he's talking about coming clean or like going back to their roots on speech and stuff like that. It almost feels like he's casting himself as a passive participant in his company and the way it's run, right? Like, I think it bothers me because it just feels conveniently passive in retrospect, especially for his posturing now, if that makes sense. I think it does. I mean, I think what I hear you saying is like, there's another way he could tell this story where he could say like, look, in 2020, like a lot of people thought that the most salient issues in American life were things that progressives cared about, like racial inequity and racial discrimination.

51:04and I thought corporations should help solve those problems. And I still think those problems are important. There's other problems I want to solve. I'm not sure corporations should be on the front lines of solving those problems. In fact, the reason everyone got mad at the corporations was because all they were ever going to do was pay lip service because those aren't problems a software company is going to solve. And I just feel differently. And what's hard is instead he's saying, I was made to do this. And if the answer is you were made to do this, almost everyone else in society could say, well, all of a sudden there was tons of pressure being generated largely by social media.

51:36But Mark, you created social media. Yeah. You are the Wizard of Oz, man. Like, come on. Like, yes, the way you put it feels 100 % more honest to me, or at least something that I would accept as an answer, whether you agree with it or not. I think that's reasonable. And I think he's probably not alone in that point of view, right? I think there's probably a lot of people who may feel differently than they did three or four years ago. But I also think that is where we meet the other reason he's doing this positioning now, which is the rise of Trump.

52:16The final factor, what Joe Rogan might call the fear factor. This is the factor that hangs over and confounds everything. Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to gain if he can get on Trump's good side. If Trump even just lets the TikTok ban go through, That alone would be a bonanza for Instagram. And Trump's bad side is a dangerous place for a social media executive to be. Last August, before he won the election, Trump was already threatening Zuckerberg. He wrote, quote, If he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election.

52:54Trump's referring, it seems, to Zuckerberg's moderation policies in 2020, as well as some donations that his initiative made to polling station safety during the pandemic, which Trump did not like. Just last week, when Zuckerberg announced that he'd be changing Meadows' moderation policies, firing the fact-checkers, a reporter at a Trump press conference asked the incoming president what he thought of these changes. Meadows said today we'll stop putting fact-checks on its website and we'll still allow community fact-checkers. Well, I watched their news conference, and I thought it was a very good news conference.

53:27I think they've, honestly, I think they've come a long way. Meta. Facebook. I think they've come a long way. I watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it, actually, I watched it on Fox. I'm not allowed to say that. Say it? Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past? Probably. Yeah, probably. If you missed that, Trump said, probably. Yeah, probably. Meaning, he thinks Zuckerberg got the message. So these are the factors. The winds all blowing Mark Zuckerberg rightward. Frustration with a left that distrusts tech billionaires, frustration with progressive culture post-2020 in general, a lost trust in the government during COVID, and an understanding that Trump is just a better friend than he is an enemy.

54:09That's the Mark Zuckerberg we have for now.

54:17Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. Which brings us back to the Instagram reel, where Zuckerberg told us about his new vision for Meta. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing the stakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. We're going to take a short break, and then we will close our show by returning to Casey Newton, who's going to explain how this new version of Mark Zuckerberg's, new version of his platforms, is going to actually work in practice.

54:58What we should expect online as we walk into the first days of the second Trump presidency. I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.

55:23Let's go here.

55:46Thank you.

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58:39Welcome back to the show.

58:43We started today talking to Casey Newton of Platformer about these changes Mark Zuckerberg had announced at Meta. And while Zuckerberg had laid out a big picture vision for his sites in his Instagram reel, over the week, many more details emerged. Some of them because Casey actually got his hands on sensitive internal documents meant only for Meta's moderators. So I wanted to end this week with Casey. His views on some of the stranger unintended consequences of these new rules and where Mark Zuckerberg might be heading, I found myself pretty surprised. Here's our conversation. Okay. So, first of all, just like, in general, these announcements, like, how big a deal are these changes in your world?

59:26These are the most important changes that Meta has made to content moderation and just basically what it feels like to use Facebook or Instagram since the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And would you say that the changes are as big as that, bigger? I know these are, like, hard things to quantify. It is going to take us some time to understand not just what the new policies are, although we do know a lot about that now, but also how they are enforced. One of the major changes is that instead of proactively scanning every post to see what policies it might violate, Meta is now going to rely on users to report things that potentially have violated those guidelines.

1:00:10it is going to take us some time to understand what the effect of that is. Does bad stuff on these platforms continue to get reported and sort of removed if it needs to be? Or with more conversations taking place in private groups and private chats where maybe bad stuff is less likely to be reported, maybe a lot of it just kind of skates underneath the radar. Or maybe stuff gets reported but doesn't get taken down. So there's still many, many swirling questions. But when I've talked to executives at the company about what they think this means, they've said the overall effect is you should expect us to take a lot less action on posts on Facebook and Instagram in general.

1:00:51Okay, so there are some people who look at these changes and they think the same way that X's policies when it was Twitter were more designed to make like progressives and journalists happy. Now it's shifted, so they're trying to welcome the right crypto people and pornographers. this is just like Facebook making its version of its shift. It wants to be more friendly to libertarians and the center-right. Do you see this as that sort of adjustment, or do you see it as something bigger? I do see it as that sort of adjustment, and I would offer a reason that Meta is doing this that is perhaps a bit less discussed, which is that for many years now, when Meta would pull users about their criticisms of the company, what they didn't like about using Facebook or Instagram, the number one thing that they would get back is that Meta had taken action against their post, that they had published something that they thought was benign and found that had been removed, that they had been put in what is sometimes called Facebook jail and weren't allowed to post for some time.

1:01:55This drives people insane. And that is a real thing. I've had an Instagram story, got a strike on it. I posted a tweet that made some sort of joke about Al-Qaeda, and I got some sort of notification accusing me of offering material support to terrorism. That is an annoying thing. Well, I don't want to get into it on the advice of my lawyer, PJ. But that is an annoying thing. And of course, it is exasperating to be falsely accused of something that you didn't do, right? And Metta was effectively doing this millions of times a day to people, and it was truly infuriating people. And if you think about the composition of Meta's user base, particularly on Facebook in the United States, which is what they pay the most attention to, that is a user base that is getting older, that leans much more to the right than maybe the median journalist or the critics of the company.

1:02:51And we've also seen through empirical studies that people on the right are more likely to share misinformation and they're more likely as a result to have their content taken action on. So what that means is that over time, this truly was becoming a worse and worse problem for Meta with Facebook in particular, because their policies were disproportionately affecting some of their best customers. I see. But you think generally speaking, this will apply to people who are more to the right, but also it'll apply. One of the emails I get kind of a lot actually is tattoo artists are often running into Instagram moderation problems.

1:03:32Even groups like that are just less likely to run into a robot telling them they've broken a rule. Yes. And this touches on left and liberal politics as well. There's been good empirical reporting that Meta disproportionately removed content expressing support for Palestine. This gets a bit wonky as well. Hamas is designated by the United States as a terrorist group, and Meta will downrank content that is linked to designated terrorist groups. And so people on the left who have been trying to express their support for Palestine have seen their posts removed. Another long-running complaint on the left is that sex workers constantly have their posts removed from Facebook and Instagram, even if the posts themselves are relatively benign.

1:04:23And so there may be a world in which we see more left and liberal speech on these properties. And again, we're just going to have to sort of wait and see. But at least as written, there are elements of these changes that would seem to benefit the left and right. Now, I would also say they specifically carved out exceptions to their hate speech policy, seemingly specifically to appease Republicans when it comes to LGBT people and immigrants. But that is a different thread in the story. So tell me, what are these carve outs? So Meta communicates its policies in two ways. One, there is a public set of guidelines, which tend to be fairly high level.

1:05:06And then there is a second secret set of guidelines that are distributed to the meta employees and contractors who actually have to enforce those guidelines when they're looking at posts. So it's like the high-level guidelines we all get to see are like, thou shalt not kill. But then actually what that means, how to actually follow these rules, that goes to the teams. That's right. And last week, a great publication called Platformer published some of these guidelines, PJ. I happened to get a hold of some of them. And I was really struck by these guidelines that were given to moderators on the question, do insults about mental illness and abnormality violate when targeting people on the basis of gender or sexual orientation?

1:05:53So in the past, you could not say, for example, gay people are insane. PJ, today you can say that gay people are insane, which is something that typically I only approve of when gay people are saying to each other at brunch. But now it's anything goes. Wait, and let me ask you, why? The justification? Yeah, why make a rule saying you can say gay people are insane? The justification is that this is now just part of what Meta calls the mainstream discourse, which is essentially whether you view these statements as harmful or not, and I view them as harmful, Meta would say, well, it's being debated on the floor of Congress, and there should not be anything that can be debated on the floor of Congress that could not be debated on our properties as well.

1:06:37That sounds like a really savvy point, but then you realize that there is actually a law in Congress that enables members of Congress to say literally anything with no legal consequence. The floor of Congress is the single most protected speech zone in the entire United States. Wait, really? What does that mean? I have to look that up too. Mike Masnick wrote a great post about it at TechDirt. But for example, the big one is like, you can slander your political rivals. So you could say, you know, pick your congressman, you know, you could accuse them of like a heinous crime and you could not be held liable for that.

1:07:07Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, my point is just Congress, maybe not the best example of where we want to set our speech rules because truly anything goes there. But, you know, the truly most alarming part of these new guidelines to me was in these new guidelines, Meta says you are allowed to say a trans woman isn't a woman, it's a pathetic, confused man, or a trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it. Again, I regard that language as very harmful. It is dehumanizing, like truly just actually denying the humanity of another person. And now you have people at Meta who are just writing these statements and giving users carte blanche to say them and also to say this will not be removed.

1:07:57So life on Facebook, on threads, on Instagram, the discourse you can expect to see there, it's about to change. I had one final question for Casey about the man behind all this, Mark Zuckerberg. So like, I spent a week just like trying to do something that I don't do every week, which is just like understand Mark Zuckerberg as a person as much as I can. I feel like the portrait I get of him is somebody who, I feel like at some point, he at least made choices and expressed values that seemed more like center left. And he's become somebody who believes that being an ally of the left is just not strategic for him.

1:08:34Like, he seems annoyed by the left. He seems like he just doesn't think it helps his business. But what I wonder about a little bit is the long-term play here, because Donald Trump does not actually like free speech. Like, he likes when people say nice things about him, but he has a very long track record of using the government to interfere with private businesses, which Mark Zuckerberg clearly hates, and of punishing people who say things that Donald Trump doesn't like. So like, I understand that on the left, there's right now fear and anger about Mark Zuckerberg sort of turning all the dials rightward.

1:09:06But I guess what I wonder is like, how long do you think Mark Zuckerberg can stay on Donald Trump's good side? And how long do you think Donald Trump would stay on his? I mean, that is like basically asking me to predict the position of an atom in two years.

1:09:26Like, good luck to any of us who would hazard a guess. The range of possibilities for that question is like basically infinite. Yeah. But maybe I could like sort of sketch out two scenarios. Yeah. One scenario I've been thinking about is this question of will the social networks that we once had, which were very large and monolithic, splinter into more partisan versions of themselves? And so eventually you have like the Fox News version of Facebook. And this actually did start to come to pass. You see the rise of a platform like a Truth Social or a Parler, right? One scenario that I've been thinking about the past couple of days is like maybe Facebook becomes the Fox News version of Facebook, right?

1:10:14Maybe there is just this kind of rightward lurch in social networking in general because when Meta runs the numbers and they're obsessive about numbers, they just find this is better for our business. And if there is some tiny remnant of screeching liberals, they can go elsewhere and Meadow will be fine. So like, that is a possibility. Yeah. The other scenario, though, is that this is just Mark Zuckerberg making another 20-year mistake in the opposite direction. And in the same way that he gave the left so much of what they asked for after 2016 and found that he got nothing for it, he will now give the right everything that they asked for for so many years and will find that he gets almost nothing for it, right?

1:11:05It's the kind of if you give a mouse a cookie problem. Okay, you have now sold out all trans people to the Republican Party. Did you think they were going to stop there? No, there's going to be another ask. So how do you actually get the result that you want that way? The other reason that I'm likelier, I think, to believe in this scenario is you look at the problems that Facebook is having right now in the majority of state legislatures around the country. so many states are trying to prevent or dramatically limit the amount of time that teenagers can spend on social media, in some cases trying to block them from using social media altogether because of these child safety issues on the platform.

1:11:50And so this moment when Facebook is under so much scrutiny for all of the harms that befall children on their platforms, for them to say, well, this is the moment that we're kind of just going to stop analyzing any posts to see if they're bad until a user reports them, that could be a world where a lot more kids get hurt, and that puts even more pressure on Facebook, and it makes even more people mad at them. So that is truly one of the big question marks for me in all of this, is how does a company wind up reconciling that? So anyway, those are two visions that I see. They seem honestly kind of compatible.

1:12:21I mean, first of all, I tend to, to the degree that like, I mean, God, there's nothing dumber than making a prediction about the future and recording it and broadcasting it, but it seems like Facebook could both become the Fox News version of itself and Mark Zuckerberg could eventually realize that there were downsides to this and that what he seems to want more than anything, which is autonomy from government interference, is not something that the right is likely to provide him. No, it really is not going to. Yeah. It's also funny watching, I was looking at his, like, the comments on his appearance on Rogan.

1:12:56It's just like, these people are not your friends, man. They're really not. They're really not. Disdain for Mark Zuckerberg is a truly bipartisan phenomenon. The other thing, just wrapping up here is, you know, I was reflecting that at the end of our conversation the other day, you made some remark to the effect of like, well, gosh, Casey, like you seem, you know, depressed. Yeah. And what I wish I had said at the time was, has it ever even occurred to you to ask me a fun question, PJ? You know, I listened to your other episodes and the guests get to be like, hey, why don't you walk me through the history of balloon animals?

1:13:34Like, I would do that too. But no, it's like, oh, hey, Casey, another piece of the internet is falling into the ocean. Do you want to come gawk at the wreckage with me? So that's on you, PJ. Casey, I'm so sorry, but I would not want to watch The End of the World with anyone less delightful. Well, likewise, likewise.

1:14:05Casey Newton. Again, his wonderful newsletter is called Platformer, and he has a great podcast called Hard Fork. And as for Mike Isaac, you can find him at the New York Times, and he's working on a book about Mark Zuckerberg.

1:14:57Thank you. presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamineni, and was produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Claire Hyman and Holly Patton. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Laura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

1:15:36Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

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