It seems like people aren’t quite putting 2 and 2 together yet. Meta has announced that it will (1) end fact-checking on Facebook, (2) flood the zone with AI bots, and (3) “get rid of content restrictions on certain topics, such as immigration and gender identity, and rolling back limits on how much politics-related content users see in their feeds.” This from the company that has routinely booted users for “inauthentic behavior.” 🙄 These might seem like isolated idiocies — for example, on Bluesky the security spokesmodel turned AI expert Meredith Whittaker razzed the AI bots as some “desperate product manager trying to ship something to meet a company OKR they don’t understand and don’t believe” (Objectives and Key Results, don’t you know). That hot take seems either naive or (as I suspect) a tad cynically misleading. Much safer to assume these two moves, and others, are coordinated and strategic: coordinated inauthentic behavior, as Facebook puts it.
As usual, Dem/Lib/Prog-world is stuck in a loop, daily clutching at its pearls over Elon Musk’s latest outrage, without really grasping what he’s already achieved. On an empirical level, he’s made as much money in the last few months as he’d made in his entire career. That’s the kind of thing that oligarchs pay attention to. What matters more, though, is that he’s moved the overton window waaaaaaay over — just not the window most people would reasonably assume based on what they see. Instead, the window he’s moved has to do with how media oligarchs see the challenges that lie ahead under Trump.
Zuckerburg has been watching all this and thinking fuuuuu…” — and, as always, is desperately grasping at straws for some strategery (“Metaverse” anyone?). So how does he catch up with Mr. Nazi Safe Space? Again, I don’t know, but it does seem like these moves figure neatly into a larger strategy. Musk has in effect transformed Xwitter into a broadcast medium that defines if not quite the truth then what many will accept as close enough. I think Zuck understands this and, in his own way, is emulating it — by creating an environment where debates about what is and isn’t true will become increasingly ponderous and futile: no fact-checking, lots of AI bots nodding / smiling / clicking on your “story,” an interface that reliably channels dissent into prefab memes and quantifiable reactions, and a user base that’s inured to and passive in the face of opaque algorithm and seemingly random takedowns.
I’ve been gradually moving my stuff away from Facebook, and if you use it you should too. I don’t mean giving it up in some cold-turkey drama, I mean deliberately arranging your affairs so that leaving at some point hence will be minimally disruptive. It’s easier than you’d think: back up your stuff, grab all those birthdays, get people’s contact info, and start finding and building nests and connections elsewhere. Oh, and don’t rely on Bsky. Use it, fine, but don’t for one moment assume that it will be reliably safe. As it continues to grow, it will become an increasingly target-rich environment with a high degree of trust, vanishingly little experience in scaling up quickly, and a user base locked in by lack of alternatives and migration fatigue.
Here’s a story, something I’ve learned from again and again. Decades ago, I had drinks with a friend who brought one of the PayPal mafia along. He was going on about how they would never face any competition, and I laughed and said yeah yeah, heard that story before. He said — dead seriously — No. Really. Ever. I asked how he could be so sure, and his answer was surprising: They estimated that any would-be company would necessarily lose several billion dollars at a minimum to fraud before they could even begin to catch up with PayPal’s heuristic understanding of fraud — and no investors would be willing to throw that much away. And, meanwhile, he said, PayPal had arrived at a sort of détente with organized crime, so their vig never got too big. And PayPal was still learning. So no competition. It had nothing to do with quality, innovation, or any of that: PayPal’s continued success was all but guaranteed because they had learned to accommodate corruption.
That was the deep lesson the PayPal mafia learned twenty-five years ago, and the fortunes they’ve built on it since far exceed what anyone seriously imagined at the time. That, more than savvy-sounding stuff about KPOs, is the frame for understanding Meta’s moves to bury the very idea of truth on their platform(s). Sounds terrible, right? It kinda is. But it’s also consistent with the idea that, ultimately, Facebook is more about entertainment than news. Then again, so is the other media empire saddled with an inexorably graying audience: Fox “News.”