Is this the end of social media we witness? I hate to say “late capitalism,” but does anyone have a better label? Having observed how Musk effectively killed Twitter/X by killing content moderation and moving to “community notes,” Zuckerberg thought it would be great to try the same recipe for his platforms. What is that definition of madness again? “Repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome” …something like that? Can somebody please explain how Facebook, Threads, Instagram, et al will not drown in the cesspool of AI, trolls, spam, and slop the same way that X did?
Ah, well, who uses Facebook these days anyway? It was already swimming in irrelevant content, and only your grandmother posts there anymore. Time to start looking for Facebook’s Bluesky?
It is ironic in a way, those who used to advocate for no regulation of platforms liked to say that competition will take care of it. Looks like they had a point, except it was not some new competitor that brought them down. They did it to themselves (sort of like constitutional democracy in some countries, some might add).
It does not end with a bang nor a whimper, but a slow, painful, ugly decline into desperation. AI propaganda, alt-right nonsense, Russian disinformation, fake news, hate speech… good luck monetizing that, mr Zuckerberg. I hope you have a profitable car company to cross-subsidize your losses…
I have often pondered why Silicon Valley has failed to develop standards and self-regulation to benefit its users, owners, advertisers, workers, etc, as most industries like to do, instead rather inviting policymakers to regulate them. At one point I had the opportunity to ask an insider just this, and they told me there had been attempts, but there was so much backstabbing between the companies that it never materialised. I guess we’ll see about the backstabbing now.
Oh, by the way, this change is only US for now. EU citizens: relax. Your online platform experience is completely safe…
Do users want stupid political discussions on their social media anyway? In the early days, somebody described Facebook as a cocktail party. You can pop in to all kinds of interesting conversations, but nobody talks about politics. Ah, the good old days… Turns out cocktail parties work best when there is a host that… you know… asks misbehavers to leave.
“The reality is this is a tradeoff,” Zuckerberg says in the video. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Happy New Year, trolls!
