Total Chaos at Meta

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders sam cole hi emmanuel mayberg hello and jason kebler hey good to be here yeah good to be here jason let's see the turnaround for the for the viewers at youtube i want to see the merch actually this is the first time i'm seeing it it's beautiful well well well well well and for For audio-only listeners, Jason is wearing the sweatshirt of our new merch, which, Jason, you wanted to give us an update on that briefly before we get to this week's stories.

1:10Yeah, so a few things. I guess I've mentioned this a lot, but I mail out all the merch from my garage. And so because of that, and because we're not an e-commerce business, really, we've been ordering not that many of each size of thing that we've bought. And very excitingly, we just got a lot of merchant in stock and a lot of it is already sold out, which we were not expecting and we're very thankful for. So I mailed like 100 packages yesterday, which is a lot. But we're out of a lot of the sizes and things like that. We are going to try to restock as quickly as possible if you're interested in buying merch.

2:03And again, one of the reasons why I don't keep a lot in stock is because it takes up a lot of space in my apartment. and now we have hoodies and sweatshirts and three different types of t-shirt and keeping all the different sizes has been really hard. So I know a few people have asked, why don't you have XYZ size? And that's because other people bought them, which is very, very thankful. But we are going to reorder and I think that we're probably going to look into just a different solution that will allow us to keep different sizes in stock for longer. So there's that. Yeah. If you go to our website for a fullmedia.co at the top, there should be a merch tab and you just click there or take us to take you to our Shopify and you can order there.

2:57And definitely looking forward to wearing the merch myself as well. Let's get to this week's stories. The first one is one that Jason wrote. The headline is, It's total chaos internally, a meta right now. Employees protest Zuckerberg's anti-LGBTQ changes. This is sort of a follow-up to what we spoke about last week, what we covered last week, but of course, well, essentially every tech publication is covering because it's hugely important in that Mark Zuckerberg and meta came out and they announced these sweeping speech policy changes and content moderation changes in that they are lifting restrictions, as they phrase it, on some topics which are out of touch with mainstream discourse, which is how Zuckerberg phrases it.

3:51I know that because I just watched the video because I'm writing my own article about meta at the moment. And those include immigration, sexual orientation, gender identity and sort of the top line takeaway is that yeah sure on facebook and instagram you can now just go and say that oh you're a you know gay people are mentally unwell trans people are mentally unwell or whatever um obviously it's not just the gender identity and the sexual orientation stuff that's just more what sort of came up in this article so that those changes all happen And Jason has been getting a ton of leaks from inside Meta, pieces last week and then these more recent ones.

4:34But Jason, how many Meta employees did you talk to for this one? And what were they telling you about the reaction inside Meta to these policy changes? Yeah, you're right. We did talk about this last week, but it's continued to be probably the biggest story in tech. So we're going to talk about what's changed. For this story, I talked to five people who are current employees at Meta, but I also got tons of screenshots of the internal reaction to these changes. And so, you know, I spoke to and interviewed five different people, but then I also had screenshots that represented like hundreds of different comments from people who say that this change is going to make people less safe, that it is sort of, well, it's very interesting because Mark Zuckerberg said that he's, anyone who leaves the platforms because of these sorts of changes is virtue signaling.

5:34but this is part of an entire news cycle and shift at the company to virtue signal to the incoming Trump administration that Meta is going to more closely align with that company's policies. And I'm allowed to leave a platform if I think people are going to give me shit. Why do I have to stay at your platform if I'm going to face that abuse myself or if my friends or my colleagues or whoever? it's ridiculous to frame it like that but sorry continue yeah i mean i think uh there's a lot to it which i think is why we wanted to talk about this again which is the broader context that this is all happening in is like mark zuckerberg has been a punching bag for conservatives for a long time uh we've written a lot about this over the years like ted cruz for example was obsessed just absolutely obsessed with the fact that Facebook once deleted a Chick-fil-A appreciation group as like hate speech or something to show that, you know, meta was biased against conservatives.

6:46And Joseph, you and I did a really big story about how content moderation used to work at Facebook. And it was clear that this was some sort of mistake. The company said it was a mistake. But, you know, there's like billions of users posting all sorts of stuff all the time. And so things get taken down by mistakes sometimes. And sort of like in the wake of Elon Musk saying, hey, there's no rules at all on Twitter, more or less. You know, he's become Trump's best friend, more or less. And there's a rivalry between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. They probably will never do an MMA fight, but they've discussed it at length.

7:26Well, that's because that's something that Musk can't fake. He can fake all he wants in Path of Exile 2 or Diablo 4, but you can't fake throwing a punch in MMA. That's a side issue. Zuck would also definitely win. Not that it matters, but it's like Zuck has spent the last several years just obsessively training MMA, whereas Elon, I don't know what he does, but he plays video games and tweets all day. But he doesn't even play video games. He doesn't do anything. That's a different story that I covered, which we're not going to talk about because I'll get really mad about it. but that's the context so there's that but then there's also the tiktok ban which is like tiktok is the biggest competitor to meta right now like you know tiktok is destroying instagram reels at least among a certain subset of users it's a better platform it has a better algorithm there's less like insane stuff on there um and zuckerberg has been for years talking about how the u.s needs to beat China, blah, blah, blah.

8:29Meanwhile, Trump has signaled that he's not that interested in a TikTok ban. But meanwhile, Zuckerberg is going to Mar-a-Lago twice. He's sucking up to Trump. He's moving the entire company to the right. And we haven't written an article about this, but I think that part of this is Zuckerberg thinks that he can possibly help get this TikTok ban over the line, get it get it banned. Then one of his biggest competitors is no longer in the US. And he's like more closely allied with the Trump administration, blah, blah, blah. He went on Rogan. He talked all about like the US government and the Biden administration attacking him for years.

9:16He's just like doing full on like right wing talking points at this point. And I mean, just on that, because you brought up the Rogan podcast, we have our resident Rogan whisperer, Emmanuel, who listens to all of the Rogan podcasts, because I'm not going to do that. And I appreciate that he sits through them and interprets them for me. Emmanuel, did you listen to the Zuckerberg Rogan podcast? And what was your takeaway from that? I listened to most of it. And it was very frustrating because most of it was what Jason is describing and kind of very transparent appealing to the incoming administration and positioning of the company where I think Zuck sees the American mainstream, which is more to the right, obviously, because Trump won the election.

10:07And it's frustrating because the Rogan style of interviewing is, with the exception of people who are anti-marijuana, He will not push back on anything. He kind of just flows with the views of whoever he has on. He's not a confrontational interviewer. I do think that it is worth listening to Zuckerberg when he talks about the Biden administration pressuring him to remove certain content from the platforms. Most of this stuff is referring to COVID-era misinformation or perceived misinformation, but even putting the merit of those posts or the removing of those posts aside, I think it is, and I'm asking the rest of you if you agree, But the fact that the current administration would email a social media company and pressure them to remove this type of content or that type of content is notable and it's kind of scary.

11:14and I totally understand him if he had first capitulated entirely to those pressures because of the panic around COVID and people weren't sure what is dangerous misinformation and what isn't. And then kind of having an awakening and being like, wow, that was a really scary moment for me as a CEO of a major social media company that has influenced over billions of people. I think that's a fair thing to bring up and be upset about and want to have better different policies around. I'm not saying that the current policies that he has are those policies, but kind of pushing back on that I think is a legitimate thing.

12:00What do you guys? yeah i mean i guess what i was gonna say is that it's very interesting because i see this primarily as like literally virtue signaling some people have called it vice signaling it's whatever doesn't matter but it's like as we've written millions of times it's like meta's content moderation is horrible and it has been horrible for a long time there was a period many years ago where it was slightly better. But they have laid off these content teams. We find horrifying shit on Facebook and Instagram all the time. They very rarely remove this stuff. They take down stuff that they shouldn't be removing all the time, such as our articles and links to competitors' websites and all this sort of thing.

12:48So I think that in practice, the content moderation situation is a disaster and has been for a long time. And the administration pressuring them to take stuff down, it feels like some sort of self-owned by the Biden administration, which is not super shocking to me. but I think that this entire like host of changes the getting rid of fact checking, which is like a terrible program should have never happened, should have never like existed because it was so shitty and like was checking the wrong things and was done by people who like, I don't think did a very good job. I just think that like rolling all of them out at the exact same time immediately before Trump takes office in this broader context is like that, That's the story.

13:38The story is like meta mask off, meta goes MAGA, the topic of like 15 different podcasts that I've seen before and things like that. But it's like, I don't think that... I don't think meta platforms were a safe place for LGBTQ plus people. I don't think it was a terribly safe place for immigrants. I don't think it was a safe place for sex workers. We've written about it a lot. And I think that to some extent, them saying like, we're not, we're overtly not going to care about this stuff anymore. We'll have impacts and bad ones. But at the same time, it's not like they were some bastion of like, good policy before this.

14:20I don't know, Sam, what do you think? yeah i mean the mask off thing is interesting because it's like did you prefer the mask like it was still the case in a lot of ways like at least now maybe they're being real about it um but yeah i mean like there's like you said there's been a million different um pieces like tearing this apart as part of like like zuckerberg's effort to like align himself with trump and it's not just like i mean it is partially like um big tech uh owners want to be in bed with whatever's in power whatever party's in power whoever's in power it's also like zuckerberg's been like dragged in front of congress several times in the last four years and like has a lot of like antitrust criticism against him and stuff like that so um i think he's he's like this is my actual like company on the line like or like it was a conversation for a while i think it's not anymore but um whether or not facebook as a monopoly was going to get broken up um i think now that's not only off the table it's like he's making sure it's not just like my company's going to be solid forever it's like my company's going to be like favored by the administration and also i'm going to have a lot of like lobbying leeway and i'm going to have a lot of like power in those rooms um so it makes sense um and yeah the mma thing is really interesting because like he's been hanging out with those guys and like obviously obviously they have had some influence like was radicalized by mma i don't know but um yeah i believe it's like a degree of like self-radicalization mixed with he's always been this way he's like a silicon valley billionaire but he was wearing that mask.

16:12And then one other thing he said on Rogan and there was a really good article in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel about this with the title, we're all trying to find the guy who did this. It's like Zuckerberg has been professional victim player. Acting like these things, such as these fact-checking programs, their content moderation policies, like all sorts of other things are things that like somehow just happened to Meta that he had no role or decision over. And it's just like, he did all of this stuff. Like, he's the CEO of the company. He's been the CEO since day one. Meta, you know, oversaw, like credibly accused of sort of like overseeing a genocide in Myanmar.

16:58It's just like, this is not... It's his fault. It's been his fault the whole time. And it will continue to be his fault. And the last thing I'll say on that is like, there's also Trump was also suing him over being banned in the aftermath of January 6th. And there's some speculation like, you know, Zuckerberg is groveling to him to drop that lawsuit or to settle that lawsuit or something. And so we have some corporate bribery occurring as well, possibly. It's just like the whole thing is crazy. well and saying that he could be in prison like i'm gonna put i'm gonna put zuck in prison for the rest of his life um emmanuel were you gonna say something everyone should be in prison involved in this they should be in there together yeah the thing that i wanted to add is that it is more mark's fault than it is anyone else's fault but how bad facebook is now i guess you can also say is a societal failure.

18:05Joe, you and Jason wrote this really deep dive into Facebook moderation. I think it was in 2019. We mentioned this piece a couple of times. And the point of that piece, in my opinion, correct me if you have a different view on it, is that at the time, Facebook was trying really hard or at least pretending to try really hard to be good moderators of its platforms, but it was an inherently impossible job, which I believe was the title of the piece. And that's because the platform is too big, it owns too much of the internet, it's in too many parts of the world, and you can't have concentrated power properly moderate all these different territories, all these different languages with different cultures, with different politics, where things have contradictory meanings than they do in other locations etc um and that's a really good point and good article um but that itself is a result of a failure of i suppose the ftc right when in the 2010s facebook was on this spree where it had challengers and whenever it had a challenger facebook just bought it right it bought instagram it bought whatsapp um it copied and essentially killed a lot of the power that snap had and i I agree with Jason that a lot of what we're seeing now is maneuvering against actual competition that we're seeing from TikTok, right?

19:28And that this appeal to the right, as Sam said, is pushing against a solution to the inherent problem, which is like antitrust, right? It's like for a few years now, we've heard kind of bipartisan support for antitrust moves against Facebook. You had it from the Democrats who thought there was misinformation and abuse on the platform. And then you had it from conservatives who thought that their conservative opinions were being silenced. And when Democrats are in power, he goes before Congress and he pretends like they're trying to do a really good job moderating. And now that Republicans are in power, he just is going to pretend like he's the most right-wing MAGA social media CEO that ever was.

20:17And I mean, I don't think it could be any more obvious than that. He's just trying to neutralize the lawmakers that who are now in power and previously said that they're going to, you know, break up his company. So now he's saying the exact opposite of everything he said previously. And, you know, I've listened to his justifications on Rogan and everything. And I think you can, I don't know, you can find a way to believe that story. But the actual reason is so obviously there on the table. Yeah, it's very interesting because they're also like a super imperialistic company, obviously. It's like they want to be in every country.

20:54They want to be all things to all people everywhere across the entire world, across every language, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you know, you don't have to do that. But they are insistent upon being that. And they're very bad at... Despite all this, they are an American company. Their focus is in the United States. They make the vast majority of money in the United States because ad revenue is higher in the US for fucked up economic reasons where the US is a richer market and so they can charge more. And so you get these situations where people in other countries especially are fucked because they don't have as good of protections and Meta does whatever it wants.

21:39And I think that Zuckerberg here sees an opportunity for Trump who wants to buy Greenland or whatever and tariff everyone. He sees an opportunity to use the United States government as a shield. And he specifically brought that up in Rogan where he was like, the EU has been finding all of these American tech companies and the Biden administration hasn't protected us. And in fact, the Biden administration was the tip of the spear attacking us, like is a specific thing that he said. And I don't know the extent to which like the Trump administration can protect Meta from EU fines and EU regulations and things like that.

22:23But I think he sees an opportunity for like, if I super align myself with this very like nationalistic president, perhaps he can like beef with France or Switzerland or the EU or whatever to prevent my company from getting fined in the future. I think it's that simple. It's like, how can he protect his company and continue to make the most money with the least interference globally? Yeah, I buy into that super cynical reading of it as well. It's just that simple, really. Speaking of gluing onto different administrations, I have a thought on that, but we'll take a quick break. And then when we come back, we'll finish talking about this story and our other story as well about location data.

23:13We'll be right back after this.

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28:16all right we're back uh to bring it back to the story that jason did one thing that's bothering me is mark zuckerberg's quote where he says you know we're lifting these restrictions because the restrictions are just sort of out of touch with mainstream discourse around gender identity and immigration, sexual orientation, and that sort of thing. And as I think we've established with all of that context, you all very clearly laid out, when he says mainstream discourse, he's talking about Trump won the presidency. But it's just a very, very easy crutch that he can rely on. And, you know, there are some very horrible people in the world, there's very horrible people on Facebook.

29:06I don't know if the majority of people participating in that discourse are like itching to get onto Facebook to call gay people mentally unwell. I don't think people are like, oh my God, finally I can do that. You know, like the vast majority of people support gay marriage and that number goes up and up the idea that you can just say oh well we're just reflecting mainstream discourse no you are creating the environment for that discussion as well um for good and for bad but bringing that up to bring us back to jason's piece you speak to these master employees with all of that context happening and all of these changes um there's a real mix of things they tell you right i mean some are joking where they say on this internal message board well i'm lgbt and mentally mentally ill so i'm going to take the rest of the day off if you don't mind what are some of the other things that people are saying and i think there's one here that i've just highlighted in our google doc which is sort of that mainstream discourse bit I'm talking about where, okay, these comments about trans people or whatever, they don't even reflect mainstream scientific consensus.

30:23Yeah, I mean, they don't. And what you're highlighting is people were very interested in how this policy was made. The New York Times had a report that basically like Zuckerberg directed this decision alongside a couple, very few, maybe six top executives, which is not how policy is normally made at Meta. I sat in on a policymaking decision where there were 200 people on a call and I was in a conference room listening to it. I reported on this for Motherboard back in the day and it was about the Tide Pod Challenge, which is where teens were allegedly eating Tide pods. And literally they were like, well, did we consult like eating disorder experts?

31:11Did we consult poison control? Did we consult like these teen safety organizations? What did they say? And this was like months after the Tide Pod Challenge had gone viral and then already wasn't viral anymore. It was like a very long process that was very considered. And so people were like, why didn't you do that for the LGBTQ changes here? It sort of didn't go through normal meta protocol. And then also it's just like, I talked to one person who said, quote, it's total chaos inside meta. People have been threatening to quit. Some people have quit. One person said I would resign in protest if I hadn't already resigned, meaning that they had recently put in their two weeks notice and were in that period.

32:04And then also, there were a few people who were team leaders who talked to me and sort of said, my team is very, very, very upset about this. So there's that. And then there's another story that I did immediately after this about meta-deleting trans and non-binary messenger themes, which is like a public-facing thing where in your DMs, with Messenger, you can change the color scheme. And Meta announced these during Pride Month a few years ago to like much, I mean, people who pay attention to this sort of thing, like Meta product updates, like there's a pretty big rollout. There's like a video, a live stream, there were like non-binary employees talking to the Trevor Project, which is an LGBTQ rights organization.

32:52and they just kind of like deleted that. They got rid of tampons in the men's bathroom in their offices for trans people who were using them. And it's just all part of like a concerted, like timed shift, right word. That's all happening at once. And I think part of it is like, these are not going to be popular changes for many of our employees, for many of our users. They also announced they're not going to do diversity. They're not going to consider diversity in hiring anymore, which is like a big thing. Yeah, they're just like rolling back all sorts of things that they had rolled out in the last few years.

33:34And I think they're trying to like do it all at once just to one, rip the bandaid off and two, signal to the incoming Trump administration, like we're here to be we're here to support your cause whatever you want to do like so meta deletes this trans and non-binary messenger theme which is just you know a color theme and messenger in the same way you could download stickers or whatever in different apps it's a purely cosmetic thing um but crucially a way for people to express themselves you know and i thought I thought Zuck said we're lifting restrictions because we want more free speech and then no but not that free speech we've got to delete this thing where people can express their sexual orientation or gender identity anyway as stupid as that is did meta because you get details about this and you write it up and you obviously always ping meta for comment did they tell you why they had removed this theme from messenger did they give you a reason it's interesting they didn't comment on this they didn't respond to this they usually respond to me and they also didn't respond to the new york times when the new york times asked about this so they haven't spoken about it specifically um it's like literally what would your response be if i'm like gonna put on my sort of pr hat and just put myself in their shoes it's like uh yeah we got rid of it because it's uh i don't know dangerous it's like complete bullshit so yeah they don't have a response they don't have anything to stand on yeah i did have an internal message from an employee who sort of like worked on this sort of thing and has been messaging this across the company like on these internal boards and they were just like uh we're trying to like bring it more in line with it was some corporate speak where it was basically like oh we have too many themes and so we're like consolidating them blah blah blah but it was like i wouldn't put much credence into it.