Notebook: (1) Letting the Dogs Out

What Meta’s recently announced content moderation changes mean for writing and discourse

“The Haywain” triptych (detail), Hieronymus Bosch. Prado Museum, Madrid

I’ve been thinking about how not only federal policy but also private commercial decisions that mirror or anticipate it are quickly becoming enmeshed in the way we receive information, with consequences that will likely be far-reaching and difficult to reverse. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, wearing a watch reportedly worth $900,000 and a recently adopted blingy gold chain, heralded the arrival of a “cultural tipping point,” “a new era” calling forth extensive changes to what gets seen and read within the world’s largest social media company, under his sole charge, which commands the attention of 3.24 billion daily users, 70 percent of people on the internet. According to The New York Times, these changes had been developed in the weeks since the presidential election and Mark Zuckerberg’s Thanksgiving visit to Mar-a-Lago to attend to a president-elect who had earlier this year called for his imprisonment and whose future government is scheduled to take his company to trial for antitrust violations in April. President-elect Trump’s designated Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened Meta in November with “broad-ranging actions” if such changes weren’t made. According to the Times, the changes were the work of a small team of advisors meeting in close secrecy, including the Meta lobbyist (Meta outspends the other tech companies on DC lobbying by a wide margin), conservative political advisor, and Trump ally Joel Kaplan, who would five days before the announced changes be elevated to the position of head of Meta’s global policy, replacing former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, teeing him up to make Tuesday’s announcement on the president-elect’s favorite show, Fox and Friends. (Mark Zuckerberg chose to do his own interview, three days later, with podcaster Joe Rogan.) Ordinarily such policy changes undergo extensive internal review and consultation with civil rights and other public interest groups. This time, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly met with the president-elect and Joel Kaplan phoned some “conservative social media influencers” the day before the announcement, but Meta staff and the contractors whose work Mark Zuckerberg was about to axe learned about the changes at the same time as the rest of the world. Meta’s Vice President of Civil Rights resigned three days later.