Mark Zuckerberg had a romantic weekend at Mar A Lago to make sure the new administration is friendly to Meta (especially with that big anti-trust case coming up), so Mark put on his best Human Being Impression to exclusively announce with Fox News that Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are about to become the shittiest places on the Internet. (x) Musty’s little dead bird app is going to lose its crown because, for all of its Nazi content, it’s still the best place to see breaking Real Housewives news and Meta will never be able to compete with that.
Mark made the announcement earlier today, wearing a watch that cost almost a million dollars mind you (x), and people starting rushing to the internet to lick his asshole in defense of his monetary interests. “Facebook has to do this or Mark will lose money!” He has more money than God, dummy, and rich white men do not need you to put underwear on over your tights and play Captain Save A Billionaire. He’s doing this because he’s a terrible person — it’s really that simple. Any other explanation boils down to that.
So! As someone who has had lots of experience dealing with Terrible Persons, allow me to translate his talking points for y’all real quick.
“Post whatever you want! I’m not paying for people to parse fact from lies — the public, who largely can’t read higher than a 6th grade level — can just put notes on stuff.”
“Trans people don’t deserve to exist and immigrants are cockroaches. It may not be mainstream, but it’ll sure drive a lot of outrage clicks!”
“No really, you can literally say whatever you want as long as it’s not like…a baby being beheaded. Even we can’t let that slide (for now).”
“I just wanted to suppress political posts long enough for my babydoll Donny to get re-elected. Let’s bring them back now! With an extra side of no-fact checking, no-censorship, and fringe hate posts marinated in propaganda.”
“The dumbest, most hateful people you have ever met in your life say the entire internet has a liberal bias, so we’re only going to hire people from Texas to moderate our new Anything Goes platform in order to get those assholes to post more.”
“The US Constitution is held together with chewing tobacco and Aquanet and you can make it say whatever you want to. Trump can’t actually read but I don’t want normal countries censoring my shitty platform where old people are giving away their life savings, Nazis say they’re oppressed, and nobody can tell that the picture of a cat flying an airplane is actually AI.”
Listen, I’m not personally bothered by this, because I wrote Facebook off a long time ago. I only go there for two things 1) for some reason, my cousins down South are still on there and that’s the only place I can be nosey and 2) my page still has a bunch of followers and idk if they have found me elsewhere yet. I’m just annoyed that we are in this place in history where the planet is not only so connected that information can get all the way on the other side of the planet in two seconds, but that the bulk of that connection is made through one company!
Half of the world is using Meta. Taking off the guardrails of at least some modicum of censorship and fact-checking to unleash even more misinformation into a global population that has lost the ability to independently research (for real! not confirmation-bias research), critically think, or effectively synthesize information is just…an extremely disappointing state of humanity.
Somewhere around 2014, we passed the tipping point of being able to say that the Internet has had a net positive impact on humanity. As it stands now, I think humanity’s greatest invention is only serving to expedite our downfall and Meta is determined to lead the charge.
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