The New Social Media Norm is Anarchy

When Elon Musk took charge of Twitter in 2022 he stated he was doing it to protect free speech and encourage open debate rather than subject social media platforms to censorship.

Musk claimed it wasn’t about making more money but an effort “to try to help humanity, whom I love.” He called for the new Twitter which he turned into X to be “warm and welcoming for all” and for it to serve civilization as the “common digital town square.” He asserted that “Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences!”

Musk slashed Twitter’s content moderation teams to ensure that X would not be unduly censored. How’s that worked out?

Today, X is filled with populist rhetoric, conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxer content. It is the personal microphone for Musk. It served to promote Donald Trump in the run-up to the November 2024 U.S. presidential election. It promotes right-wing content. It has become a digital town square where its citizens air their grievances, rage and hate.

Now Mark Zuckerberg is doing to Meta’s social media properties, Instagram and Facebook, what Musk did to Twitter when he turned it into X.

This week Zuckerberg announced changes to content moderation policies for Meta’s social media properties. He stated that it was time for the two social media apps, Instagram and Facebook, to end “too much censorship” and “tune our content filters.” It was time to no longer remove content once seen as inappropriate.

Zuckerberg said, “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.”

The current Facebook and Instagram have used third-party fact-checking programs for those using the apps in the United States. The new strategy which Zuckerberg calls “Community Notes,” emulates X as its model. The goal is to change content moderation criteria, to give “a diverse range of perspectives.” His announcement stated, “We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.” That bias he is talking about is equated with more liberal causes like diversity, equity and inclusiveness which equals “woke,” a word that is anathema to those on the right side of the political spectrum.

The transition to the new method of fact-checking content is beginning in the first quarter of 2025 and will be rolled out over the remainder of the year in the U.S. There is no word of its deployment elsewhere.

The rationale for this change, Zuckerberg claimed, is that content moderation has suffered mission creep and has become too prone to “over enforcement.” Zuckerberg no longer wants any restrictions on topics like immigration, gender, gender identity, and political discourse. The focus for content moderation Zuckerberg states will now be on “illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams.”

In a commentary I read today describing this change to Meta’s policy, it was described as “opening the gates to hate speech.” My thoughts were isn’t Facebook already filled with postings that are anti-women, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-gay and more? Instagram is as well but to a lesser extent.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. GLAAD, an American non-profit media monitoring organization founded in 1985 and aimed at ensuring gender rights, already describes Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites like X, TikTok and YouTube, as being “directly responsible for the uptick in hate and violence on the LGBTQ community.”

It has been clear to me that since the outbreak of the war between Hamas and Israel that began in October 2023, antisemitic content is on the rise on the two Meta sites let alone other social media platforms. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has reported a 28% increase in antisemitic content on Facebook alone. Instagram has had a smaller increase but before the October war, a BBC report showed anti-Jewish content on the site was not taken down with any regularity through its content moderation policies. However, the two Meta sites pale in comparison to X which has seen a 919% increase in antisemitic content.

This doesn’t bode well for either Instagram or Facebook when it comes to tamping down rage and hatred. Zuckerberg is opening a new Pandora’s Box.

To see what Instagram and Facebook will look like soon, just go to X where Musk has turned the social media app into a platform to promote his politics. Although I remain subscribed to X, I am increasingly aware of how often Musk is the subject of posts to the site. Here Musk has more than 208 million devotees and each of his posts receives over 2.4 million views within an hour.

X is losing subscribers to other social media sites. I remain on it but have added BlueSky, Threads, and Mastodon to my social media universe and am revisiting old standbys such as Tumblr and Reddit. Where Facebook was a “go-to” place for me when I first joined nearly 20 years ago, I now engage readers of my blog more often through LinkedIn and the other aforementioned social media sites.

With the latest Zuckerberg announcement, I wonder if he will follow the Musk path to use Facebook and Instagram as his bully pulpit. We shall see.