Foreword:
Though this article is highly critical in nature, the point of it is not to attack or shame anyone for using or having used X or Meta platforms. Consumers are victimized by large corporations that have ruthlessly inserted themselves into our everyday lives. I would rather my argument serves to empower you, the reader, to make any amount of positive change in your life in better alignment with your system of value and of which you can be proud.
This article intended focus on our culturally incentivized and longstanding financial support of only two shitty billionaires of many. Also relevant to this piece is how the impact of social media as we know it today, including TikTok, is net-negative; also relevant to this piece are similar CliffNotes-esque criticisms of other shitty billionaires who maintain their power through digital spaces, such as Spotify’s Daniel Ek or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. These are worthwhile topics on their own, and I hope you, the reader, keep digging into related topics as your continue to rethink the use of the products and services many of us acknowledge to have a stranglehold on our society, lives, and culture.
On January 7th, 2023, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to its moderation systems to “prioritize free speech,” crediting the pivot to Donald Trump’s second election. In addition to totally eliminating fact-checking systems in favor of something akin to X’s Community Notes feature, they dramatically loosened hate speech policies for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. GLAAD published a comprehensive overview of changes in their press release condemning these changes. The changes listed below are selections cut directly from GLAAD’s press release and/or Meta’s Hateful Conduct Policy.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism [sic] and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
Meta has removed several definitions of “contempt,” including “intolerance on the basis of protected characteristics, including but not limited to: homophobic, islamophobic, racist.”
Meta has also removed clauses prohibiting the following: “the usage of slurs that are used to attack people on the basis of their protected characteristics”
- Removal of prohibitions against dehumanization of protected groups — Previously, Meta prohibited “Dehumanizing speech in the form of comparisons to or generalizations about:
- Inanimate objects: For example, “women as household objects or property or objects in general … transgender or non-binary people as “it.”
- Criminals: For example, “thieves,” “bank robbers,” or saying “All [protected characteristic or quasi-protected characteristic] are ‘criminals.”
- Removal of prohibition against statements denying existence — For example, “[protected characteristic(s) or quasi-protected characteristic] do not exist” or “[protected characteristic(s) or quasi-protected characteristic] shouldn’t exist.”
Zuckerberg has compared his companies’ previous censorship policies to “something out of 1984.” If he thinks moderating hate speech and irrefutable disinformation about topics like COVID-19 is more Orwellian than proliferating propaganda resulting in real-world outcomes, promoting entirely fabricated content and accounts made with artificial intelligence, intending to replace “mid-level” engineers with artificial intelligence, and claiming that Facebook (a site started by Zuckerberg to rate the attractiveness of his female classmates) needs less “feminine energy” and more “masculine energy,” he could divert any amount of time spent effectively colonizing part of Kauai towards a novel that might as well be an allegory for the America’s Big Tech oligarchy.
Additionally, in his ongoing makeout session with Donald Trump’s ass, Mark Zuckerberg has suddenly slashed his company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives donated one million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund, and announced that his content moderation teams will move to Texas because having his team in California “seems too biased.” This last piece is not for optics, at least not exclusively; Texas now has a law barring social media companies from suppressing content from users based on their political affiliation, a law passed to nurture conservative victimhood and conspiracy. Meta is now in a better legal position to continue to allow and/or promote misinformation and hate speech on the ground of its likely conservative affiliations. This may also be an attempt to ride the coattails of X/not-Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed First Buddy of the United States and the man who bought Donald Trump his second election for seventy million dollars, which announced its move to Texas six months prior. X now suspends only one-fiftieth (2.2%) the number of accounts for hateful conduct violations as it did pre-Musk.
Following Musk’s takeover, he went on to reinstate a slate of accounts that were previously banned for breaking the platform’s policies: U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (COVID-19 misinformation policies), the Babylon Bee (conservative satire site who misgendered a trans politician as “Man of the Year”), Andrew Tate (banned from Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok) was banned for saying that women should bear “some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted alongside explicitly sexist and queerphobic vitriol), and liable rapist Donald Trump. All these people were reinstated under Musk.
Elon Musk does nothing to obfuscate his transphobia, promoting transphobic disinformation about Olympic athletes, misgendering and deadnaming one of his children multiple times (and crying about it), banning the word “cisgender” as a slur to piss people off, and countless other examples strewn about the seemingly unending stream of puke he artificially pushes to his platform’s users every single day. That doesn’t mention his own sexual assault allegations, objectively wack offer to impregnate Taylor Swift, and connection to child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maybe it’s superfluous to remind everyone of all the reasons why Elon Musk is an anthropomorphized vat of toxic refuse. Maybe it may be more informative to highlight his ongoing and very public fall from sanity starting with the baseless accusation that a dive team that refused his services was a pedophile to talking to himself under a pseudonym and posting an AI picture of himself as Iron Man as two ridiculous examples of his prolific, concerning, and nonstop use of his own social media platform, and his apparent Nazi salutation Donald Trump’s second inauguration. I am writing this is so that you, the reader, can see plainly and in one small space a few of the reasons why these tech entrepreneurs, who are only rich and relevant because their services are so widely used, are unsavory by what are likely your own standards. Consider how many actors, musicians, content creators, companies, etcetera you and your friends actively boycott or talk immense shit about for any number of reasons and ask yourself how your use of Facebook and/or Instagram and/or Twitter is not feeding a more savage beast which inevitably heralds much stronger consequences.
Why are so many self-identifying anti-capitalists or anti-racists using platforms that survive off of manipulating the attention of their users for the benefits of the multibillion-dollar corporations they shit-talk on said platforms? How can you stand up for women, queer people, and people of color when policies are actively becoming more accepting of this hateful content following Trump’s second election? How can you use the platforms that routinely disseminate disinformation for profit, which is then used to buy a democratic presidential election? Social media, in its current iteration, is doing more to perpetuate racist, sexist, queerphobic sentiment and policy than any user or group can counteract using the same tools.
You need to start reacting to social media companies and their executives as we do any other product companies or celebrities that are problematic. You need to boycott these products. The only way to make an impact as an anti-capitalist is to not fuel the obvious engines of the attention economy, hyper-consumerism, and a lot of rich assholes. I know your friends use them. I know they may provide convenient and useful services. I know you may get national, international, and local updates from their feeds. As the lines between the digital and material worlds continue to blur, even though the internet already domineers commerce and our social lives, we need to remember that this is yet another company and another system we can and need to resist. Life was possible before the advent of smartphones and every innovation that continues to grant social media companies power, and is still. If you, the reader, consider yourself a devotee to anti-capitalist counterculture, I hope you consider chipping away at the fortune and cultural relevancy of tech billionaires with dystopian dreams of the future by deleting your accounts on their platforms through which they maintain power.