Did you hear the news? Mark Zuckerberg died yesterday

The news came in a text from a friend.

It was a copy of something in Facebook that was pasted into an Instagram post. 

The story is fake. 

It is parody and commentary. 

It intends to demonstrate the peril of failing to moderate or fact-check posts on a social media site.

The full fictional account continues: 

"The billionaire tech whiz, who was admitted to hospital on Sunday, said Facebook would stop fact-checking posts and that he loved dressing up in a gimp suit and playing with dolls.  

“In general, private companies probably shouldn’t be in the position of checking facts,” Zuckerberg – whose funeral will be held next week – said in an interview with Fox News.

As tributes flowed in from across the world, Zuckerberg – who lists Adolf Hitler amongst his heroes – said people had a right to hear a range of views and that censorship was anti-democratic.

He is survived by his eight children and three wives. Authorities say the incest charges against him will now be dropped."

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, now Meta, announced a change in Meta's content moderation policy. He said, “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression." He said their fact-checking operation had "too many mistakes and too much censorship." He said "bad stuff" would get published, but free expression meant there would be trade-offs. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

This morning's blog post is an example of Zuckerberg's trade-off. "Bad stuff" came in the form of a memorable headline. It was click bait. Then I said it was false. This is free speech at work, as Justice Louis Brandeis prescribed: "The remedy to falsehood and fallacies . . . is more speech, not enforced silence.” 

I used to believe wholeheartedly in what Brandeis wrote. Now I have reservations. "More speech" works better in an environment where publishing and broadcasting news and commentary is difficult and expensive. That gives publishers an incentive to take care and to have pride in the credibility of their publication. "News" was curated, imperfectly and sometimes with profound bias, but there existed a difference between "news" and The National Enquirer. Or between "news" and rumors told by strangers. 

Social media is the way many people get most or all of their news. I have real world experience in content moderation. Most of the comments here are inspired by commenters who have a partisan world view or a grievance over a perceived injury. Those comments are typically "honest" expressions of a viewpoint, even if they disagree with each other. I publish them. But many comments I get for publication are intentionally disruptive and dishonest. A Trump supporter invents obscene and defamatory accusations. I delete those, along with marketing spam and phishing links. Free-for-all public comments are like a midnight walk in a dangerous neighborhood. To echo Trump's opening campaign statement back in 2015, in unmoderated content there are people bringing lies. There are people bringing defamations. There are con artists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Donald Trump and his political allies are pressuring social media sites to end moderation. They think it will advantage them. It fits the paradigm of populist "forgotten Americans" rebelling against elites. Biographies for writers at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker show that these publications are richly populated by graduates of elite colleges who then reflect elite sensibilities on politics and culture. Trump and his allies complain that social media moderators unfairly correct MAGA viewpoints. Zuckerberg is bending with the currents of power. Trump won the election. Give him what he wants. Besides, its cheaper. 

We will see how Zuckerberg, Trump, and MAGA like the free-for-all. My own experience is that unmoderated content would destroy this blog. Let's see what it does to Meta. Misinformation is more interesting and clickable than the simple truth. Lies are fun.

Did you hear that Zuckerberg is a convicted pedophile, and that he died last night? I read that somewhere.

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