Two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg apologized for something he didn’t actually do to appease a bad faith actor demanding he take responsibility for something that didn’t happen. This week, he’s claiming that he’s done falsely apologizing to bad faith actors demanding accountability for things he’s not responsible for.
Pardon me, but I think I’ll wait for some actual evidence of this before I take it on faith that he’s a changed man.
There were plenty of times over the last decade that Mark Zuckerberg seemed both unwilling and unable to speak up about how content moderation / trust & safety actually worked. He was so easily battered down by bad faith political actors into issuing pointless apologies that it became a sort of common occurrence. Politicians began to realize they could capitalize on this kind of theater to their own benefit.
Over the course of that decade, there were many times when Zuck could have come out and more clearly explained the reality of these things: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale, mistakes will always be made, and some people will always disagree with some of our choices. As such, there are times that people will have reasonable criticisms of decisions the company has made, or policies it has chosen to prioritize, but it’s got nothing to do with bad faith, or partisan politics, or the woke mind virus, or anything like that at all.
It just has to do with the nature of content moderation at scale. There are many malicious actors out there, many calls are subjective in nature, and operationalizing rules across tens of thousands of content moderators to protect the health and safety of users on a site is going to be fraught with decisions people disagree with.
Zuckerberg could have taken that stance at basically any point in the last decade. He could have tried to share some of the nuances and trade-offs inherent in these choices. Yet, each and every time, he seemed to fold and play politics.
So, there’s one side of me that thinks his recent appearance on some podcast in which he suggests he’s done apologizing and now focused on being more open and honest is nice to hear.
The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control.
“Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
Of course, that would be a hell of a lot more compelling if, literally two weeks ago, Zuckerberg hadn’t sent a totally spineless and craven apology for things that didn’t even happen to one of the most bad faith “just looking for someone else to blame” actors around: Jim Jordan.
So it’s a little difficult to believe that Zuck has actually turned over a new leaf regarding political posturing, caving, and apologizing for things he wasn’t actually responsible for. It just looks like he’s shifted which bad faith actors he’s willing to cave to.
The problem in all of this is that there are (obviously!) plenty of things that social media companies and their CEOs could do better to provide a better overall environment. And there are (obviously!) plenty of things that social media companies and their CEOs could do better to explain and educate the public about the realities of social media, trust & safety, and society itself.
There are all sorts of problems that are pinned on social media that are really society-level problems that governments have failed to deal with going back centuries. A real leader would strive to highlight the differences between the things that are societal level problems and platform level problems. A real leader would highlight ways in which society should be attacking some of those problems, and where and how social media platforms could assist.
But Zuckerberg isn’t doing any of that. He’s groveling before bad faith actors… and pretending that he’s done doing so. Mainly because those very same bad faith actors keep insisting (in a bad faith way) that Zuck’s previous apologies were because of other bad faith actors conspiring with Zuck to silence certain voices. Except that didn’t happen.
So forgive me for being a bit cynical in believing that Zuck is “done” apologizing or “done” caving to bad faith actors. The claim he’s making here appears to be explicitly about now caving to a new and different batch of bad faith actors.
