Author: Evan

On Facebook

social media

CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has decided that moderation of comments on his platforms has become too biased and is shifting to a model of Community Notes, aka the model used on X. (formerly Twitter)

ABC: After Trump’s election win, Meta is firing fact checkers and making big changes

As mentioned in my first, previous and somewhat timely post, this is not Meta’s first foray into misconduct on their social media platforms. One such event revolved around Cambridge Analytica which in 2018 was revealed to be illegally gathering personal information of users of Meta’s social networks for the purposes of aiding political campaigns, like the Trump 2016 Presidential Campaign.

Upon discovery, Meta took some surface-level actions to try and mitigate the damage caused to it’s corporate reputation: Highlighting privacy to users and making their settings more obvious, rolling out GDPR compliance across it’s platform worldwide, not just in the European Union, and it also increased staffing levels and standards in it’s moderation and community standards.

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, now that enough time has passed and with more friends on the way in government circles, Zuckerberg has decided that it’s time to revert some of these policies back to the same behaviour from the past by removing fact-checkers and moving content moderation staff from the high minimum-wage-paying state of California to Texas, where staff who suffer from PTSD after looking at some content will perhaps be paid a princely minimum wage of $7.50 per hour. The reasoning for this is being pushed as that the existing moderators are too liberal in blue-state California and the reinforcement of freedom of speech.

This shift is especially troubling given reports of suppressed comments about Palestine since 2023, raising concerns about whose voices will be amplified and whose will be silenced under the new model.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for freedom of speech, but not at the expense of common courtesy and certainly not at the expense of facts.

The simple fact is that Facebook and it’s associated social media networks have been largely changed from, originally, a place where opinions are swapped and shared to a place where opinions are measured, shaped and governed.

This occurs because we allow it to. Every post or comment that we add to Meta’s servers provides more content to be analysed, parsed and dissected so that you are shown news, posts and advertisements which are tailored for you and your experience. After all, you don’t have to think about things that you already know or agree with.

Of course, this is not new information – we already know this.

And yet, there are still three billion people on Meta’s platforms.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink our participation in platforms that shape our discourse for profit.

Nostalgia + Reflection

meta

You probably have an era which you would consider “the good days of the Internet”. For me, that was the early-to-mid 1990s, where we enjoyed “easy” access to a new medium where information, which hitherto could only be transferred by post, fax, or voice from one person to another, was able to travel between multiple people in an instant. Certainly as much information as a 14.4k dial-up modem would allow.

Things like the World Wide Web were new and acronyms like “IRC” and “Usenet” were somewhat commonplace amongst the nerdy crowd. Little thought was paid to the idea of information ownership. We spoke freely on servers paid for by those who could afford it. Sometimes this was one individual; sometimes it was more collective. But it was infrastructure generally run and maintained out of altruism so that we could all enjoy one another’s company and the sensation of using technology that felt anonymous, futuristic, while staying somehow personal and authentic. It felt genuinely subversive in a sense, and gratifyingly so.

Much of today’s technologies stemmed from the open and free collaboration that was borne from this generation, not to mention relationships and life-long friendships.

Fast-forward to 2025, and the world has changed — and certainly not for the better. Discussion forums and blogging have mostly given way to social media, which has been corrupted and monitored for the slightest bit of personal information. This shift has led to a new age where personal data has become a commodity, privacy an afterthought, and authenticity drowned out by algorithms that thrive on polarisation.

It worries me that scandals like Cambridge Analytica have been mostly forgotten, swept under the rug of convenience. Society’s collective privacy has been steadily eroded. We’ve traded agency for ease, individuality for metrics. The rise of bots powered by large language models let loose into the public domain adds another layer of concern. Left unchecked, these tools risk transforming the very essence of online communication into something impersonal, curated, and devoid of nuance.

This blog is my own small step toward reclaiming some of the freedom and authenticity I value deeply. I’m still undecided about whether to allow commenting — an aspect of the Internet I value but rapidly losing it’s authenticity as AI becomes more human-like — but even without it, this space represents my deliberate return to simpler, more intentional digital engagement.

In returning to this format, I’m hoping to recapture the original spirit of the Internet — at least for myself. A spot where I can write and embrace a more intentional way of engagement, even if it’s just one-way for the moment.