Zuck Finds His Spine
A late mea culpa: “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday in a video posted to Facebook and a message posted to Threads. Referring to Meta’s trust and safety team tasked with content moderation, he said: “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” said Zuckerberg, announcing sweeping changes: No more (partisan) fact-checkers (appointed from on high); a community notes system, akin to Elon Musk’s approach at X, will replace the old. Certain content—topics like immigration and gender—will no longer be so restricted. And the trust and safety team will be relocated from California to Texas, which Zuckerberg claims “will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content” (as if Texas has no lefty tech employees).
But Zuckerberg claims he wants to work with Donald Trump, once he takes office, to counter global censorship, detailing Europe’s “ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship” as well as Latin America’s secret courts “that can order companies to quietly take things down” and the ongoing, perpetual threat of Chinese censorship.
This fairly robust mea culpa satisfies Robby Soave, and that’s good enough for me. We’ll take it. A little bit of head-in-hands reflection, coupled with substantial policy change, is better than what we can expect from, say, our news media. These changes will make Meta a better platform that’s less oriented toward paternalism and top-down control. They’ll also just happen to have the effect of possibly making it once again more competitive with X.
Gulf of AMERICA: Trump, never a man to be hemmed in by norms let alone international law, has declared recently that he’s interested in buying Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and possibly getting the Panama Canal back under American control.
Speaking for about an hour at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, Trump outlined some of his latest ambitions, which have been greeted with apoplectic headlines from mainstream outlets.
Here’s a transcript of his comments, and here are some excerpts:
The Panama Canal is a disgrace, what took place at the Panama Canal. Jimmy Carter gave it to them for $1 and they were supposed to treat us well. I thought it was a terrible thing to do. It was the most expensive structure ever built in the history of our country, relatively.…We gave it away for a dollar, but the deal was that they have to treat us fairly. They don’t treat us fairly. They charge more for our ships than they charge for ships of other countries. They charge more for our navy than they charge for navies of other countries. They laugh at us because they think we’re stupid, but we’re not stupid anymore. So the Panama Canal is under discussion with them right now. They violated every aspect of the agreement and they’ve morally violated it also. And they want our help because it’s leaking and not in good repair and they want us to give $3 billion to help fix it. I said, well, why don’t you get the money from China, because China is basically taking it over.
And later:
We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring. That covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name and it’s appropriate. It’s appropriate.
Also:
We’re goi
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