Meta and Zuck Make Free Speech News

January 9, 2025

Techmeme makes clear that Meta and its charming leader are important and “real” news. I checked the splash page of the online news service and learned:

Zuckerberg is “pretending” about free speech. You can read that legal / journalistic explanation in TechDirt
Mastodon, another social media service, will filter some Meta content. (Isn’t that censorship?) Read that TechCrunch story here.
The truth outfit — Thomson Reuters — reports that the European Union says, “Hey, we don’t institutionalize censorship!” Top up your info tank at this link.
The paywalled orange newspaper asserts that in 2023 Meta did the “give me money” approach to business, letting some “top advertisers” call ad placement shots. The FT discloses what may be non-public information too!
The Bezos journalistic enterprise, another for-fee operation which may have some staff issues, points out that the US of A and Europe may not see eye-to-eye when it comes to filtering content.

Here’s what the Zuck-dense splash page looked like at 545 am on January 9, 2025:

Several observations:

The message about what is permissible and what is not permissible across the Zuckerberg properties is not clear
The gestalt of the cited stories is that Meta is responding to and taking advantage of an opportunity to define “free speech” so it conforms with the expectations of certain person of influence in the United States
The decisions illustrate a certain opportunism with benefits in the management think tank at the Zuck operational headquarters: Reduce some costs, generate buzz, and dump the baggage of trying to establish and maintain an editorial policies that get in the way of generating cash or “free” money.

Net net: The difference between Meta’s approach to innovation to that of an organization like Telegram becomes increasingly clear. Focusing on Meta could result in missing important Telegram signals.

Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Censorship, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.