Notebook: (2) Letting the Dogs Out

Hugely consequential tools are being built-to-order by our moment

Untitled, Carlos Mérida (1979)

Read Part One of this post here!

The other changes to Meta content policy announced on Tuesday include restoring political speech to the feeds, where it had been previously demoted to avoid controversy (for this Mark Zuckerberg consulted his feelings: “it feels like we are in a new era now,” “we’re starting to get feedback that people want this material again,” just exactly when one might say au contraire), and that he is moving content moderation staff to Texas, where many of the teams have actually been located for many years, implying (“as we work to promote free expression,” in free-expression idyll Texas, “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”) that these low-paid employees themselves are responsible for policy decisions that are in fact made at a high level—again throwing staff under the bus for his own decisions. Dave Willner said on “Lawfare Live” that the content policy-making staff was actually increasingly concentrated in Washington, DC, under the direction of Joel Kaplan.

Mark Zuckerberg’s last announcement was that Meta will be teaming up with the Trump administration to promote free speech around the world. Using the might of the government to defend speech against “censorship” is an interesting twist on the original formulation. Mark Zuckerberg identified threats to free speech in China (where, as legal scholar Katie Klonick noted on “Lawfare Live,” he has substantial business interests that the Trump administration can help him advance) and Latin America (in an apparent reference to Brazil’s suspension of X after the platform failed to curtail far-right accounts and alleged misinformation). Mark Zuckerberg did not mention Europe, which has in recent years enacted far more restrictive legislation that menaces the tech companies’ reach and profts—or “innovation,” depending on whom you ask.

What is behind these moves? President-elect Trump himself said this week that Mark Zuckerberg was “probably” motivated by Trump’s threats to imprison him. Mark Zuckerberg also “needs the antitrust threat to go away,” as tech journalist Brian Fung put it; current Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said Meta might be after “a sweetheart deal” with the administration, “and I hope future enforcers wouldn’t give them that.” Internet policy researcher Daphne Keller wondered how much Zuckerberg wants leverage against European regulators. Katie Klonick said, “everyone has seen over the past four months, two and a half months in particular, this huge technocratic billionaire meeting of the minds with Trump … all of the private platforms going in this direction under the auspices of a principled stance of freedom of expression, but really because it serves their bottom lines quite well and also because it is politically expedient.” But others who have been observing Mark Zuckerberg argue that this transformation is also in tune with his own evolving beliefs.

Casey Newton wrote about how frustrated Mark Zuckerberg was that his efforts to accommodate concerns about harmful speech on the platform did not win him more admiration, and Charlie Warzel said on The Bulwark podcast that he thought Elon Musk had laid claim to a sort of “weird edgelordian discourse,” a “renegade nature,” that Mark Zuckerberg wants in on. On the Joe Rogan podcast Mark Zuckerberg lamented that “corporate culture” had become “neutered,” and claimed there is a “kind of masculine energy I think is good … I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits.” After being “pressured” by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain things (in June the Supreme Court affirmed government officials’ First Amendment right to advocate for, but not coerce, publication decisions), “I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and this is how it’s going to be going forward.” Mark Zuckerberg did not mention pressure from conservative groups and politicians in favor of his newly announced position.

Then on Friday Meta ended its diversity, equity, and inclusion program, saying in an internal memo obtained by Casey Newton’s Platformer that “discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics” and that the term “DEI” “suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.” According to Casey Newton, in 2022, when the company's DEI initiatives were operating at full strength, only 37.1 percent of Meta employees were women, 4.9 percent were Black, and 6.7 percent were Hispanic. On Thursday, Meta removed transgender and nonbinary identifying imagery from its Messenger app and sanitary products, for transgender employees, from men’s rooms in their offices.

That a company whose platform provides information to such an overwhelming number of people throughout the world should transform its inner workings on the basis of one man’s interests—whether commercial or ideological—is alarming. These decisions mark one more giant withdrawal of our information-distribution system from the provision of vetted, documented information. The tech companies make vast sums of money unleashing with unrivalled ease and scope information that they celebrate as unmoderated by considerations of truth or merit, acknowledging in principle no responsibility for the material or the results. That we are to be swamped with truthlessness and provocation is arguably embedded in the very nature of these instruments, which have, with their vampiric economic model, bled dry all reality-bound forms of communication.

Two other developments in recent weeks have underlined the extent to which the very infrastructure of ideas is undergoing profound and perhaps irreversible transformation. On January 2 a federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, which enable the government to protect equal access to the internet, preventing broadband providers from delivering improved or degraded internet service to parties of their own choosing, a minimal level of consumer protection in the view of consumer rights journalist Karl Bode. Net neutrality protections had come and gone in successive presidential administrations—President-elect Trump’s nominee for the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr had denounced them—but this ruling, based on the Supreme Court’s June Loper Bright decision, which removed traditional deference to government agencies to craft regulations, appears decisive. Legal scholar Katie Klonik noted that the prediction by the originator of the phrase “net neutrality,” legal scholar Tim Wu, that the internet would become a power vacuum and a new frontier for geopolitical conflict to be contested by Europe, China, and the US, is “literally what Zuckerberg said today [Tuesday] was happening.”

Meanwhile on Monday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in a blog post that his company was now equipped to build “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a goal that until recently seemed decades away and demanded dedicated preparation by computer scientists, philosophers, legal scholars, and legislators. (Sam Altman is in the process of severing his company from the public-interest nonprofit under whose auspices he founded it.) The announcement had shades of self-interest-motivated spin: OpenAI needs significant additional funding to reach its promised goals. And Sam Altman’s description of AGI this week for Bloomberg’s Josh Tyrangiel, as the ability of AI agents to “‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” seems not quite the same as “think for themselves.” But OpenAI’s release in December of a “reasoning model” called 03 that appears to far surpass any previous AI systems, having the ability to “learn” and “acquire new skills outside the data it was trained on,” gave weight to the claim.

It is unnerving to receive this news just as any hope of US regulation of the development of artificial intelligence decisively evanesces. (Sam Altman: “Before OpenAI gets to release o2 or o3 there should be some sort of federal testing framework that says, here’s the dangers that we’re most the harms we're most interested in monitoring, mitigating, here’s a set of tests, and before you can release it, you know you’ve got to be able to certify, like you would for a new drug or a new airplane or whatever, that this model is safe in these ways.”) Meanwhile the leaders of the companies investing the most in building AI are conspicuously aligning themselves with political interests. Google, Microsoft, Jeff Bezos/Amazon, Tim Cook/Apple, Mark Zuckerberg/Meta, and Sam Altman have all committed $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inauguration fund. (Donations to the Biden inaugural fund among the five were Amazon $276,509, Google $337,500, and Microsoft $500,000.) This hugely consequential tool is being built to order by our moment, just as the plumbing inside Meta and the internet itself—once created by the government to serve the public good—bends itself to individual, commercial, and political interests.

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Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Some of her related Notebooks on technology and the reading life include:

“Immoderate”: On moderation and politics on the internet
“Mr. Smith and Goliath”: On government intervention in tech
“Exercising Intelligence”: On governance in AI
“The AI We Live Now”: On writers and publishers responding to AI
“Predicting for Text”: On the arrival of ChatGPT
“Thought Plutocrats”: On tycoons and access to ideas
“The Facebook Files”: On the revelations of Frances Haugen
“The Writer of the Future”: On writing and tech

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