TWIBS: Human CEO Zuckerberg Says Hate Speech is No Big Deal!
CEO of Meta (Facebook, Instagram) Mark Zuckerberg, well known human being from earth, has announced that hate speech against LGBTQ+ people is totally fine on the massive social media platforms he owns!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Surprising possibly nobody on earth, Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) has done something incredibly vile and myopic! In a video posted to Facebook on Tuesday, CEO and real human being Mark Zuckerberg explained that they would be doing away with their fact-checking program as part of a series of changes made to their content moderation policy.
“The problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes,” he explained, in a way that an extraterrestrial being masquerading in the rapidly decaying flesh prison of a hollowed out man simply wouldn’t. “Even if they accidentally censor just one percent of posts, that’s millions of people. We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship.”
As he provides no data to suggest this is true, I will logically assume it is not. Duh.
Unbelievably, Zuck goes on to justify this change to content moderation by saying, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” It’s unclear what this means, but considering his net worth is $213.5 billion, I’m going to guess he and I viewed said elections through very different lenses. Suffice to say, I don’t see a lot of free speech promulgation from the president-elect and his cabal of evil sycophants.
Then, at last, he outlines his plans: Meta will replace fact-checking with community notes, a move that has worked stunningly for Twitter; they will “simplify” their content policies, and “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He says he doesn’t want people with “different ideas” to be “shut out,” and that he wants to “make sure people can share their beliefs and experiences” on Facebook and Instagram.
So what does that mean on a practical level?
It means that, I shit you not one bit, Meta explicitly allows hate speech against queer people moving forward. No, really, they say the quiet part out loud in their community policies:
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality,” they say, as well as arguing for “gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs.”
Frankly it feels more like Meta is getting back to the roots of Xbox Live calls where sweaty, angry boys delighted in calling me slurs when I whipped their asses in Halo.
Zuck also says that Meta plans to move their Trust and Safety and Content Moderation teams from California to Texas, because he believes it will help them build trust to do that work in places where there’s “less concern about the bias” of their teams. You know Texas, right? Where everything’s bigger? Where, they say, there are only steers and/or queers? Where there’s certainly no concern for bias?
Normal fun human guy Mark Zuckerberg wraps this demented, evil proclamation by declaring that he will be working hand-in-hand with Donald Trump to combat censorship abroad. He says that Europe has too many laws about digital communication, that Latin America has secret courts that hate free speech, and that China upset him by blocking Meta’s platforms entirely.
If you’re wondering what Trump’s take on the situation is, he supports Zuck’s reforms. In fact, he acknowledged that the company is likely making these changes in direct response to threats Trump has made against Meta in the past.
So if you use Instagram, uh… stop reading the comments, I guess? It seems like they may be about to get a lot nastier.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
