this news is funded by viewers like you please support our work at democracynow.org this is democracynow democracynow.org the warrant peace report I'm Amy Goodman with nine she I'm n sh Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world out with the fact Checkers that was the message delivered by meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he announced sweeping changes at Facebook Instagram and threads Zuckerberg outlined the new changes in a video posted online the recent elections also feel like a cultural Tipping Point towards once again prioritizing speech so we're going to get back
to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms first we're going to get rid of fact Checkers and replace them with Community notes similar to X starting in the US after Trump first got elected in 2016 the Legacy Media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy 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 US that's meta CEO
Mark Zuckerberg Nicole Gil the head of Accountable tech called meta's move a quote gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world the decision comes weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Trump at maralago and after meta donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration ation on Tuesday meta also appointed a close Trump Ally Dana White to the company's board white is the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship Trump praised the new meta policies honestly I think they've come a long way meta Facebook I think they've come a long way Mark Zuckerberg also announced other changes including a loosening
of rules over what kind of content can be posted on Facebook and the other sites under the change women can be referred to as household objects Meda users will once again be allowed to say gay and trans people have mental illness and more to talk about what meta's new policies mean in the US and worldwide we're joined by three guests in Manila Philippines were joined by mariaa founder CEO and executive editor of the Philippine Independent News site Raper she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work defending free expression in the Philippines her
book is titled how to stand up to a dictator the fight for our future SAA viathan is the author of antisocial media how Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy he's professor of media studies and director of the center for media and citizenship at the University of Virginia his piece for the guardian just out Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga and in Doha we're joined by Mark Owen Jones associate professor of media analytics at North Western University in Cutter and an expert on disinformation he's the author of digital authoritarianism in the Middle East deception disinformation and
social media let's begin with you Professor Jones um digital authoritarianism can you talk about how Mark Zuckerberg's announcement soon after he met with Donald Trump and is giving well over a million dollars to the inauguration and put of his closest allies Trump's allies that is on his board fits into that concept and what it means digital authoritarianism yeah absolutely thank you for having me I mean digital authoritarianism broadly speaking is the use of digital technology to uh for authoritarian ends you know it's fundamentally anti-democratic and I think Zuckerberg's move is indicative of the authoritarian direction
that the United States is going he is essentially saying that the social media company or meta is uh subservient to the whims of the political Elite and I think a key part of digital authoritarianism here that's really important is this notion of the post truth authoritarianism thrives on the absence of facts it thrives on a war on reality why is that the case well because authoritarian leaders they want they're not interested in the truth because the truth can be used to attack them to discredit them as we know that Trump is was was documented as
being one of the most lying presidents and politicians in history but they want an alternative reality alternative facts and the idea of a war on fact Checkers really fits in with this because what it means is that authoritarian leaders they want people to respect them they want people to fear them they fundamentally want people to uh see the world through their eyes and be submissive to their wishes and and I think that's what this represents is that Mark zeper is clearly bending the knee to Trump not only doing his bidding but also creating this massive
donation and I think what we need to understand about digital authoritarianism is that we are in a space where we increasingly communicate on digital Technologies Zuckerberg's move is designed not just to quote unquote uh prevent censorship here censorship is a euphemism for actually harm against minorities some of the examp examples you mentioned were were women but also transgender people but also immigrants were mentioned by Zuckerberg himself these are all right-wing dog whistles essentially what this means it's going to be is open season on these digital platforms for people to attack minorities and to harm them
it's not about reducing censorship it's actually about increasing digital violence against minorities which is part of the new I would say increasingly autocratic America mariaa could we get your response to meta's new policies uh you've said that Zuckerberg's decision would lead to quote a world without facts uh and that that was a world that's right for a dictator so could you could you respond to what Mark said uh now and what you think this means in particular for the Philippines for social media uh meta social uh social media sites in the Philippines well I mean
first of all the Philippines we had about with our own dictators starting in 2016 and we I I would say we were in Hell on under our previous president and now we're in purgatory while the United States has just headed to hell it feels like um let let me let me quickly say it's not a free speech issue which is what he claims it's a safety issue and uh exactly what we just heard um what you're seeing is that now this platform one that unites more than 3.2 billion people around the world has declared open
season on minorities actually it's no longer safe for any person cuz one of the things that we've learned in the Philippines is that the Insidious manipulation on this takes away will right so we already know around the world that um it has become a platform that has enabled genocide this is in Myanmar in Southeast Asia meta itself sent a team and they concurred with the United Nations in two separate findings the second one is this is a platform that hacked our biology that changes the way we feel fear anger and hate to change the way
we see the world and the way we act election interference um what you've seen now is uh as early as 2016 on brexit um the UK actually finded Facebook then the largest amount at that point in time because of what would be equivalent to election interference nothing else was done beyond that but again part of the reason the world is where it is where as of last year 71% of the world is under authoritarian rule we are electing illiberal leaders democratically partly because our public information ecosystem social media Facebook is corrupting our individual Communications with
each other taking away agency and Maria could you say specifically I mean in a in a place like the Philippines there's almost 90% of the population in the Philippines is on Facebook and how is Facebook Book used uh not only in terms of posting information but also as a means of communication uh and the way in which misinformation has spread on Facebook in the past not only of course in in Myanmar uh which is uh the example that you cited but also in the Philippines and elsewhere I mean very specifically our past president Rodrigo duterte
used the design of what was an advertising and marketing platform of Facebook to to do information op operations uh I was getting an average of 90 90 hate messages per hour um free speech used to stifle Free Speech but beyond that these networks of information Warfare networks of disinformation literally changed our history in front of our eyes setting the stage for the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr the only son of our dictator who was in power for 21 years Ferdinand Marcos you'll remember Marcos and her shoes his her son Ferdinand Marcos Jr won overwhelmingly in
our presidential elections because literally um Filipinos were taught in information operations YouTube meta on Facebook that um that Marcos was not a dictator in 1986 outed in people power instead he was the greatest leader the Philippines has ever known in two 2021 the rohinga refugees actually sued Facebook's parent company meta over its failure to stop violent hate speech on its platform which contributed to the bloody military Crackdown of the rohinga Muslim Community by the military in 2017 in Burma also known as Myanmar law firms in the US and UK launched the legal effort on behalf
of the rohinga around the world including in Bangladeshi refugee camps plaintiffs demanded over $150 billion dollar in Damages the UN found as many as 10,000 rohinga were killed by burmes forces during the 2017 genocide though some estimates put the death tollet twice that over another 73,000 people were forced to flee the country I just want to go to a quick video part of a video produced by amnesty featuring a survivor of the ringa genocide my name is sah uh I am from Myanmar but now I'm living in Bangladesh Kus Bazar as a displaced [Music] National
I personally experienced that online hate speech turned into offline hate for us there were many different things on Facebook against us which turned the people of Myanmar against us I saw many different anti- rinda posts on Facebook for example I still remember a post that said the birth rate of these Bengali rohinga people is very high if it remains continuously like this we will become their slaves now there are slaves let's go for [Music] Action I knew about the option of reporting hate speech to Facebook I already reported some hate speech to Facebook but it
only said thank you for reporting this post doesn't go against our community standards wanted to bring CA vathan into this conversation author of antisocial media how Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy a professor at the University of Virginia and I wanted to go to this issue of hate and how deadly it can be um whether we're talking about Burma myanma or whether we're talking about the United States um I mean you have just giving a bunch of examples roughly seven and 10 lesbian gay bisexual adults have encountered um any harassment online fully 51% have been
targeted for more severe forms of online abuse you have roughly about a third of women under 35 may have been sexually harassed online um you have uh studied of 51 countries reveals 38% of women had personally experienced online harassment uh Professor vathan if you can talk about the connection to hate um and how that connects to well your headline of your guardian Peace Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga right well let's let's be clear about this change and I'm I'm really thrilled that you've started this conversation by going beyond the United States what Mark zugerberg
announced the the other day clearly only applies to the United States in terms of its specificity um in the United States since 2017 beta has been trying to at least appear that it's taking content moderation seriously and let's remember the proper phrase to describe what we're talking about is content moderation factchecking was never part of the formula it's not about facts it's about protecting users it's about protecting people from things like harassment from protecting groups of people from campaigns and movements people like the citizens of my town Charlottesville Virginia who encountered a flood of violent
right- wiers in the summer of 2017 through an or a movement that was largely organized through Facebook um so the idea here and why why ber has appeared before Congress multiple times swearing that he's doing a good job has all been about the United States the content moderation policies and procedures and infrastructure beyond the United States have never been sufficient and have never been serious with the exception of Western Europe Facebook like every other digital media company pays particular attention to the demands and laws of the countries in which it op operates and therefore it
didn't pay much attention to the demands of content moderation and protecting users in the Philippines it's never paid attention to protecting users in India or in Pakistan in Cambodia in usbekistan these are places where uh tremendous uh propaganda flows through uh Facebook channels unmitigated now the United States question though in this in this sense is what is zukerberg changing zukerberg is is scrapping a rather elaborate and expensive system that sort of worked to keep the Nazis at Bay and to somewhat limit things like harassment uh and somewhat make sure that the user experience in the
United States is not horrifying the way that one would encounter horrifying material on X today for instance he's gone against that and I I think it's wrong to think of this as a pandering to Trump or or getting down on his knee to Trump it's actually just the opposite in the United States the government is subservient to corporations especially this Corporation zukerberg always gets what he wants out of the United States government he sees an opportunity to get even more of what he wants out of the Trump administration because what he wants is to is
to be able to threaten and win in a power struggle against Lula in Brazil who has put forth very strong regulations against all social media companies so zukerberg absolutely cares more about Brazil than he does the United States Brazil is still one of the most fervent and potentially uh important growth markets for meta he's extremely concerned that the United States be able to use its power to limit regulation in Europe as well so what he's hoping is Trump's erasable um offthe hook predictable foreign policy uh throwing sticks around the world might help limit Europe's willingness
to regulate Facebook and Brazil's willingness to regulate Facebook this is all about opportunity not subservience he is hoping that once again the US government is subservient to Facebook so Mark Owen Jones if you could uh uh respond to what uh uh meta has said the new uh form of content moderation will be this idea of community notes which is what uh is operative on Elon musk's X and and why you think this decision has been taken now and what the effect will be well I think it's very clear that the community note system which involves
basically a certain group of in X's case a sort of anointed fact Checkers not fact Checkers sort of people commenting on uh viral posts to to to determine whether it's truthful or not is really problematic it doesn't work and and there's a number of reasons why it doesn't work because essentially what it's resulted in is people not correcting facts but people just posting their opinions uh as fact so what we're getting is not factchecking or in theory content moderation we're getting this relativization of Truth where people just respond to some information that they disagree with
politically or for some other reason and then say the opposite and so all your do is getting this kind of situation where it's not even about verifiable facts anymore but just about presenting an alternative opinion and I think the reason I mean this is going to be rolled out we're not quite sure on on meta's platforms but it won't work and crucially I think there's a you know another Point here that's very interesting firstly for the Zuckerberg him abandoning this factchecking system is going to save him money the idea of community notes is also in
theory going to increase engagement which might mean more profit for Facebook uh but fundamentally what it's going to do is just actually create a space in which people are going to engage in increasingly contentious arguments and there's a really important point we need to bear in mind here is that Community notes also implies that there's a Level Playing Field when it comes to the kind of information that's put out there on Facebook right we don't know which posts are getting promoted which posts will get community noted we also know that and I I really want
to make this point is that sometimes this community notes thing is is framed as a bottomup form of free speech it allows users to engage in debate it's not about Free Speech it's about the free market of speech and the difference is that the free market of speech allows people with authority influence to actually have a louder voice than others whether that's paid advertisers or Facebook's algorithms deciding which information gets promoted more and therefore Community noted and that's really important because we know from Facebook all this talk of free speech is misleading because Facebook have
been known through their testing to promote content that is quote unquote bad for the world the kind of content that will make you angry or potentially laugh so Facebook are in the business of modulating public conversations and this community notes thing is a smoke screen to suggest that Facebook are actually uh permitting free speech and user-led factchecking it's a system that won't work and it's a system that will just lead to increased polarization and the undermining of democracy by polluting the information space with ideal logical disinformation Professor vathan Zuckerberg said in his announcement Wednesday that
met is moving its trust and safety content moderation teams out of California to Texas a movie said would quote help us build trust to do this work in places where there's less concern about the bias of our teams now this comes after the Elon Musk founded companies Tesla and SpaceX changed their incorporation state from Delaware to Texas uh run of course uh with Republican leadership from Senator Ted Cruz to the governor of Texas talk about the significance of this and as you talk about you know um metago Maga yeah I mean it's purely symbolic uh
it has no operational significance um you know the the people who work in that field and there will be many fewer of them that's important but the people who work in that field um it doesn't matter where they sit right it's it's it's they're trained the same way they have to follow the same rules it's a very structured system for Content moderation um the the real question here is all of those thousands of contracted workers many of whom were in englishspeaking countries or partially englishspeaking countries around the world low wage workers uh people in places
like India and the Philippines um people who were uh who were subjected to hours and hours of horrible images and videos animal mutilation child abuse um horrible violence uh they are um they their fate is that basically they won't have any jobs anymore which you know they had horrible jobs before but those contracts will all be canceled the small group of domestic Facebook employees will be moved to Texas or I'm not sure exactly what he means by that and he may not even follow through on it right there's no reason to believe anything he said
um he no one will hold him to it uh and I I don't think it means much except that it was um a a symbolic or or um or or signal to a symbolic signal to uh to the Republicans that this is some sort of um uh candy for them uh but I don't think it's going to change the Facebook experience in any significant way what really will change the Facebook experience is the fact that Community notes will fail uh and that uh our Facebook and Instagram experiences will be filled with hate speech almost immediately
um it's going to become uh deeply unpleasant the real question is will it become so unpleasant for advertisers that they start pushing back at meta and if that happens because that's the only other counterveiling power at work in this system then uh there could be another correction to this policy uh and I wouldn't be surprised by that zukerberg has no principles on these matters except that what is good for Facebook is good for the world and uh he everything he does follows from that so mariaa so as SAA said now we can anticipate that these
platforms are being filled with hate speech you've said that you will do everything possible to quote ensure information Integrity so tell us how do you think individuals and uh Independent News organizations like like yours can ensure that there is a truthful fact uh checked information available as these sites get flooded with misinformation well it's already happened right Corey Dro coined the phrase the intific of the internet and in fact I don't know if you guys saw shrimp Jesus on Facebook right AI generated crap um this is and Facebook says that it's going to be adding
more of this so um I think the first step is um to actually do what we did which is to collaborate collaborate collaborate the way we were able to take over the center of the Facebook information ecosystem was by creating something we called fax first pH uh a a collaboration of about 150 different groups four layer pyramid the bottom were 16 News organizations working together right so fact checks don't distribute don't spread as fast and as far as lies laced with fear anger and hate so what do you do well you have 16 News groups
doing daily fact checks but the second layer that's Civil Society groups the church business groups that's the group that is essentially distribution we called it the mesh layer we organized ourselves so that every person in these groups will share one fact check every day but we'll share it with emotion the third layer where academic um partners of ours we gave a a a pipeline of the fact checks of the data and every week the academic because again what what's who are the first groups under attack just like Mark Zuckerberg said in that quote the journalists
so as credibility was pushing backwards because we're under constant attack the academ came in and every week leading up to our 2022 elections academics came in and told people what met Anar atives were being seated what was going viral which candidate was actually winning in this and finally the last layer is lawyers six different law groups left right and Center that protected rule of law you cannot have uh in in um rule of law without Integrity of facts and just uh three or four days before our elections we did take over the center of the
Facebook information ecosystem but here's your problem just in order to have fact you have to work quadruple four times five times harder and you have to collaborate more that's an interim solution the longer term solution of course is the other group that's abdicated responsibility for protecting the public are actually democratic governments who failed to build a public teex stack this is not a free speech issue again just to pull together right this is in the end Facebook is after power and money and president Trump gave his Blessing Mark Zuckerberg now feels more comfortable maybe the
cases won't come right that's what you're seeing jostling but the second part is it will surveillance capitalism unchecked will bring Facebook more money a company that makes more than $300 billion do a year at the expense of the safety of the people on the platform democracy Now is funded by viewers like you please give today at democracynow.org
