Facebook is in chaos

Now they want free speech. Two months ago they blocked me for 10 years for no reason with no reasonable recourse. Look elsewhere for a business partner.

Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to abandon content moderation on Facebook and free up political content marks a watershed moment in the platform’s chaotic evolution. It is disgraceful in its way, but it may also amount to an admission that whatever they were doing was a half-hearted sham.

The controversial move is widely seen as a capitulation to the right, as it mirrors Elon Musk’s actions following his 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), when he reinstated banned right-wing agitators (including Donald Trump), many of whom had been deplatformed for hate speech and disinformation. Musk’s rationale was championing “free speech,” but in reality, it was a transparent pander and political maneuver indifferent to the cost.

Now Zuckerberg (who tried playing prophet of the metaverse and now plays catch-up on AI) is copying this as well. By ending efforts to suppress disinformation and political extremism, Facebook is signaling its alignment with what it perceives as the political winds of the moment, which will rightly be seen as an effort to curry favor with Trump (after Meta raised eyebrows by joining other tech giants in donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund).

The rationale for moderating content was clear. Studies consistently show that hate speech, racism, radicalism, and disinformation spread further and faster on social media than balanced, factual content — undermining not just the discourse but society itself. A 2018 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth, and it took true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people compared to false ones.

This attaches to the novelty and emotional reactions elicited by bullshit. Moreover, lies can be as interesting as they need to be while the truth is constrained by facts. If you care at all about decency and civility, well, these are further constraints on the prospects of being interesting.

So platforms like Facebook and X profit from the engagement generated by divisive content, even as they foment radicalism while claiming to foster discourse. By dropping moderation, Facebook is signaling to radicals that they are free to propagate their views unchecked, further amplifying the platform’s role as a megaphone for extremism.

And which extremists might these be? Well, it is all over the map, in a way. Twitter especially was once the preferred platform for woke mobs to try to “cancel” whoever offended them somehow, to such excess that it caused great harm to the wider progressive movement and to goals that were actually reasonable. But these days, and more profoundly in my view, the dynamics driven by the disinformation-boosting algorithms have fueled the rise of populist right-wing movements globally — because right-wing populism thrives on visceral appeals to fear and anger, which are tailor-made for social media.

And yet, as a politically centrist writer with what I believe is a more nuanced perspective, my own experience tells a fuzzier story.

I write a newsletter and various columns that tend to be critical of Trump (his vulgarity and boorishness, ignorance and corruption, indecency and authoritarianism) as well as the Republican stance on guns, healthcare, climate change, and other issues. But I’m also skeptical of leftist excesses and have defended immigration controls, criticized wokeness, and condemned the clueless fringe’s flirtations with jihadism. My commentary calls for active intervention against the Iranian regime and critiques what I see as President Joe Biden’s softness toward its radical Islamist proxies. In short, centrist.

On Facebook, I maintained a modest writer’s page where I shared articles and TV appearances. Two months ago, I discovered it had been “temporarily” blocked for unspecified “community guidelines violations.” Days later, the block was extended to 3,600 days—a full 10 years.

There was more.