Meta, Trump, and the Inflection Point: The Implications of Kaplan’s Speech Announcement on the Digital Security Service (DISA)

It seems like it should be a cautionary tale, instead of a North Star. Advertisers and users have fled in droves since Musk took. Timelines are increasingly filled with far-right debate-me edgelord accounts that post a constant churn of misinformation. (And that’s just the owner.) Meta is clear that this is the future it wants.

Meta’s new moderation and fact-checking policies in the US have brought attention to a key issue, likely to grow under the incoming Trump administration: the regulation of speech online.

“I’ve been expecting Meta to axe this program for years,” says Alexios Matzarlis, director of Cornell University’s Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative and founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped establish the partnership between Facebook and fact-checkers in 2016. “But not in this manner and with this timing, which is so nakedly political.”

But at what cost? Well, potentially plenty. Community notes can be used as part of a moderation system, and Fact-checking is not beyond reproach. But little in Kaplan’s announcement of the changes—or Zuckerberg’s accompanying video—gave much hope that this will be an upgrade.

Even so, Keller says she worries that Zuckerberg’s rhetoric toward Europe in his announcement could create a dynamic that emboldens European regulators who want to go after US platforms over speech concerns. They will interpret it to allow themselves more powers, because he will offend them, and they will get their back up. He could be driving them into becoming the censors he claims they are now.

“The inflection point is Trump, and Facebook is just following along,” says Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. Meta is telling Trump that they want to be involved in a fight with Europe. We are with you on your side. She says that they are pro-free speech.

During a press conference after Meta’s announcement, Regnier said that Europe isn’t asking any platforms to remove lawful content. We need to differentiate between illegal and potentially harmful content. We want platforms to take appropriate risk mitigation measures.

The fears that the DSA would turn the EU into aMinistry of Truth are unwarranted, since the law isn’t “pre-programmed” to do that.

TikTok is a First-Principles Appoach to the U.S. Senate, but What Do You Really Want to Know?

Often, I’ll come across it as a comment on a video of a teenager on TikTok doing something that could easily be considered embarrassing, like singing out of key or obsessing over something others find cringe. Even more upsettingly, you’ll find that comment, word for word, on videos from people with disabilities simply existing. These commenters think that it is easier to be mean to people on social media platforms. The idea is that if the users posted to Reels, they would get the harassment the commenters think they deserve.

TikTok is staring down a nationwide ban this week. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, has decided to make his platforms more dangerous to appease the incoming president.

The Hateful Conduct policy at Meta allows users to make blatantly homophobic, transaphoretic, sexist, and racist posts without repercussions, as my colleague Kate said this week. For Platformer, Casey Newton noted that, lost amongst other changes, Meta removed a sentence from its guidelines “explaining that hateful speech can ‘promote offline violence.’” Doing it immediately following January 6 is really something to see.

The Supreme Court will also take up TikTok’s lawsuit against the US government and its attempts to ban the app nationwide. We are now less than two weeks out from the deadline for a sale or an extension, so the court doesn’t have a lot of time to save the app—if that’s even what it ends up doing.