https://www.garbageday.email/p/zuckerberg-officially-gives-up
"I floated a theory of mine to
Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel on this week’s
episode of
Panic World that content moderation, as we’ve understood, it
effectively ended on January 6th, 2021. You can listen to the whole episode
here, but the way I look at it is that the Insurrection was the first time
Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms
like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the
Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon
Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar
incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced
with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating,
companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would
never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.
This explains Meta’s pivot to, first, the metaverse, which failed, and, more
recently, AI, which hasn’t yet, but will. It explains YouTube’s own doomed
embrace of AI and its broader transition into a Netflix competitor, rather than
a platform for true user-generated content. Same with Twitter’s willingness to
sell to Elon Musk, Google’s enshittification, and, relatedly, Reddit’s recent
stagnant googlification. After 2021, the major tech platforms we’ve relied on
since the 2010s could no longer pretend that they would ever be able to
properly manage the amount of users, the amount of content, the amount of
influence they “need” to exist at the size they “need” to exist at to make the
amount of money they “need” to exist.
And after sleepwalking through the Biden administration and doing the bare
minimum to avoid any fingers pointed their direction about election
interference last year, the companies are now fully giving up. Knowing the
incoming Trump administration will not only not care, but will even reward them
for it.
Like everything else in culture right now, much of this can be traced back to
Musk, who has spent the last two years proving to other tech CEOs that no one
will or can really stop them from using their massive information networks to
fulfill their most despotic desires. But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this week,
is the first Big Tech oligarch to fully come out and admit he just doesn’t give
a shit anymore."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
