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January 7, 2025
Something Unusual Is Happening Over At Meta's Facebook And Instagram As CEO Mark Zuckerberg Announces Major Changes To The Platform Guaranteed To Enrage Internet Liberals
Let me begin this by saying I don't trust META's CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, as Facebook and Instagram were some of the first to ban accounts questioning the Covid-19 origin story, climate change, the safety of the Covid vaccines, the 2020 election, and a whole host of other issues, because the banned users dared question the "authoritative" scientific consensus," much like Google, and the old Twitter before Elon Musk bought it.
With that out of the way, Zuckerberg was one of the first to publicly acknowledge the harassment and threatening tone of the federal government censorship complex, to call them out for pressuring compliance in removing accounts for what George Orwell called "wrongthink."
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives. And while it was Meta’s decision whether to remove content, he continues, “the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
As an aside: ANP didn't focus on those comments at the time because it was just days before ANP's Stefan Stanford passed away and news of any kind took a backseat to taking care of him and keeping him comfortable.
I can distrust someone and dislike their politics, and still offer credit when it is due, and Zuckerberg is one of the biggest names in social media, so his statements did garner attention, and kudos for that.
Maybe all that Jiu-Jitsu training gave him one extra hard knock to the head that brought a little common sense back, or maybe he just saw the tide turning politically and is trying to keep his platforms relevant. Either way, he has made some comments that just eight years ago, one couldn't imagine a radical liberal like him saying.
The personality change came with a makeover of his looks, no longer the short-haired geeky robotic look, and more tussled and lifelike.
The first comments that shocked many conservatives, while dismaying liberals all across the internet, was his reference to Trump's fist raised yelling "fight, fight, fight," with the flag waving behind him, right after being shot by an assassin, as "one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life."
Those examples came before the November presidential election, and now, after the results are in and were certified on January 6, 2025, we are seeing another big change "supposedly" coming to META, via Facebook and Instagram.
ANP EMERGENCY!! - With the loss of Stefan Stanford, ANP's financial situation has become dire.Without significant contributions, the future of All News PipeLine, and our ability to stay online, is in danger. Anything at all ANP readers can do to help us is hugely appreciated.)
This morning January 7, 2025, a piece from AboutFB.com, written by Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer, began with a video of Zuckerberg explaining changes that are being implemented over the next months to the way Facebook handles controversial topics and discussions.
The takeaways are the following:
• Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.
• We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.
• We will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.
Listen to him and judge for yourself.
While readers can listen to the whole thing, a key point is Meta's plans to get rid of "fact-checkers, because evidently Zuckerberg finally realizes those same fact-checkers have their own political biases, and were making matters worse.
That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.
We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.
The article claims Meta itself will not be writing the community notes, but users will be offering the content, with links proving why the community note is correcting the original post.
At X, those Community Notes then get voted on by users across the political spectrum, to determine if it shows up alongside or beneath the originating post.
Whether Meta, and Zuckerberg himself, actually implement these changes in a non-biased way, remains to be seen.
If they do implement these changes properly, Facebook will see what X has seen in recent months, of liberals, unable to control the conversation anymore by getting conservatives booted or suspended, will fly away to "BlueSky," the new liberal haven where they do not have to see an opinion they don't agree with, never mind actually having to debate with a member of a different political affiliation.
As it turns out, the people who love Bluesky aren’t modeling better behavior or fostering a safer environment than their peers on X.
To the contrary, they’re creating a safe environment only for the vanishingly small proportion of the country that thinks exactly the way they do to browbeat those who don’t.
Incredibly, some progressives’ reaction to Trump’s resounding defeat of them is to retreat even further into their self-radicalizing bubbles.
The last piece of news on this U-turn by Meta, enough to give everyone whip lash, is that Meta has offered a Trump friend and ally, Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, a place on their board of directors. He accepted.
Also:
The political leaning of Meta's board and top leaders appears to be in transition, as the departure of Nick Clegg — a former leader of the UK's Liberal Democrats party and Meta's ex-president of global affairs — was announced earlier this month. Joel Kaplan, who has been the company's vice president of global public policy since 2011 and has extensive connections with the Republican Party, will replace him, Business Insider previously reported.
Changes are coming, but the actual reason for them could be anything from political expediency, to Musk's X taking a large part of their users now that conservatives voices aren't being terminated at the site formerly known as Twitter.
BOTTOM LINE.....
Whether all these changes are due to political expediency, or the result of Facebook losing members to X, which saw many of these changes after Elon Musk bought the platform, matters not if these changes level the playing field between the right and left to offer an opinion and discuss topics without interference.
Time will tell.
One last note, as Steve Quayle has often opined, social media is the first time in history where Americans created their own personal dossier, online and publicly, for the federal government to use.
For those considering checking out the changes, just to see if they truly work to make Facebook a level playing field, please remember Quayle's warning and limit the amount of personal information you offer on any social media platform.
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