Summary
Mark Zuckerberg has shifted Meta’s policies and leadership toward conservative positions, signaling alignment with a potential Trump administration.
Key moves include ending professional fact-checking, reinstating Trump’s accounts, criticizing the Biden administration’s COVID-19 policies, and promoting Republican-aligned executives like Joel Kaplan.
Meta has also faced scrutiny for supporting Trump-aligned figures and causes, including donating to his inaugural fund.
Zuckerberg, previously supportive of some progressive initiatives, now emphasizes reduced content moderation, citing political and regulatory pressures.
Critics view this as a strategic pivot amid evolving U.S. political dynamics.
Facebook was always right-wing. Have people already forgotten the way they manually adjusted their newsfeed algorithm to favour right-wing outlets? (PDF link) https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115561/documents/HHRG-118-IF16-20230328-SD038.pdf
More or less. Now the mask has fallen off.
Zuck himself has made some noises about being “misled” by progressives into … being more progressive? A charitable interpretation would be that he was clueless and didn’t understood the reasons behind what he was told or thought.
Well, it is true that he was pretending to be progressive only out of convenience. He was always a huge dirtbag. The original iteration of Facebook showed pictures of female Harvard students and asked users to vote on which they found more attractive.
On a related note, what do you think is his motivation for releasing source available LLMs?
I’m assuming the same reason they are ostensibly on board with the fediverse - some kind of embrace-extend-extinguish tactic. I’m not Machiavellian enough to imagine the finer detail beyond that.