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Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism.
And not just “on the agenda” in general, on today’s agenda at the European Council, “where national ministers from each EU country meet to negotiate and adopt EU laws”.
They never give up, and with “they” being the European Union, they only have to win once.
The EU proposal to scan all your private communications to halt the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is back on regulators’ agenda – again.
What’s been deemed by critics as Chat Control has seen many twists and turns since the European Commission presented the first version of the draft bill in May 2022. The latest development came in October 2024, when a last-minute decision by the Netherlands to abstain from the vote prompted the Hungarian Council Presidency to remove the matter from the planned discussion.
Now, about two months later, the controversial proposal has returned and is amongst the topics the EU Council is set to discuss today, December 4, 2024. EU members are also expected to express their vote on Friday, December 6.
That’s today, kids.
As mentioned, lawmakers have implemented some changes to the EU CSAM bill amid growing criticism from the privacy, tech, and political benches.
Initially, the plan was to require messaging services and email providers to scan all your messages on the lookout for illegal material – no matter if these were encrypted, like WhatsApp or Signal chats, for example, to ensure that communications remain private between the sender and receiver.
Lawmakers suggested employing what’s known as client side-scanning, a technique that experts, including some of the best VPN providers and messaging apps, have long warned against as it cannot be executed without breaking encryption protection. Even the UK halted this requirement under its Online Safety Act until “it’s technically feasible to do so.”
Fast-forward to June 2024, the second version of the EU proposal aims to target shared photos, videos, and URLs instead of text and audio messages upon users’ permission. There’s a caveat, though – you must consent to the shared material being scanned before being encrypted to keep using the functionality.
The article titled Liberal Authoritarianism from Uncibal should serve as a foundational understanding of where not just the British state is but to a fair extent much of the Western World.
Starmer, it is plain, is one of those socialists for whom the appeal of socialism lies not so much in its amelioration of poverty, but rather in its provision of a rationale for the imposition of a perfect order on society – the construction of a ‘great social machine’, as Sydney Webb once put it, within which every individual must be made to fit. There is the touch of the Javert about him; he is one of those men who, all things considered, prefers the stars, who ‘know [their] place in the sky’, to people, who have an irritating tendency to exhibit free will. There is also in the air around him a quality that CS Lewis called ‘Saturnocentric’, which Michael Ward summarised as a combination of the ‘astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory, and serious’. It is no surprise at all that Starmer should once have made his living as England & Wales’ Director of Public Prosecutions: this is a man who would take to the political task of steering public policy regarding criminal prosecutions like a duck to water.
It should also be no surprise that Starmer was once a human rights lawyer. Some have found it difficult to square these two aspects of his character. Silkie Carlo, the prominent civil liberties campaigner, for instance, remarked in a recent interview concerning the use of live facial recognition how strange she found it that Sir Keir, who purportedly is a human rights advocate, would embrace a technology that seems almost designed to usher a Chinese total surveillance system into the UK.
But this confusion is based on a complete misunderstanding of what human rights are all about.
I heartily recommend reading the entire linked article as it is penetrating indeed. But I do lament the loss of the term ‘liberal’ to now mean someone intolerant of all unlicenced opinions and behaviours, i.e. to mean someone who is profoundly illiberal.
This excellent article brings two other quotes to mind, one from a certain Italian leader and the other modestly from me.
Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state(Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato)
– Benito Mussolini (speech to Chamber of Deputies – 9 December 1928)
…and…
Socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with political interaction, the very negation of civil society itself.
I recently purchased a train ticket online for a trip wholly within Sweden from Swedish Railways, SJ. The terms and conditions came in an English version, and I note the following:
‘Terms and conditions of purchase and travel
The ticket is non-transferable. On the journey, you need to show a valid ID document (passport, Nordic driving license or ID card, national ID card from an EU country or the Migration Agency’s LMA card that shows that you are an asylum seeker).
The covering email also states:
‘If you can’t show the ticket digitally, you can print it and take it with you on the journey. It’s not possible to print at the train companies’ service points.
The tickets are personal and only valid together with an ID document.
Have a nice journey!
SJ’
So in Sweden, you can become a fare dodger (i.e. a criminal) if you don’t have some form of State ID on you even if you are using a train ticket that you have paid for in full.
How long before our exciting new government finds this a useful way to limit movements, although some might think that in the UK, if you do have a passport, as a regular citizen, you soon won’t be allowed on a train in case you go somewhere nice or go to meet people of a like mind. Either way, it is a sinister development.
“If free speech is a measure of a modern liberal democracy, Brazil is in trouble. A crackdown on expression and the denial of due process for those who contradict the state’s version of the truth dates back to 2020. Now it’s getting worse.”
– Mary Anastasia O’Grady Wall Street Journal ($). She is writing about Brazil’s clampdown on X, aka Twitter. Other countries are looking and watching.
The article made me think slightly more kindly of the previous Conservative government and slightly less apprehensively about the plans of the new Labour government. Or have I been misled, and Labour’s resurrection of a failed Conservative policy is exactly as sinister as I always thought it was?
Today, however, free speech and politics are under concerted assault in the liberal democracies of the West. The public-private consortia directing that campaign—what has been called the Censorship Industrial Complex—was the topic of a conference at the end of June in London.
[…]
The war against free speech is being fought with treaties and official agreements with wording as broad as a shotgun’s blast. One of many examples is the OAS’s 2013 Inter-American Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. Article 1 of the Convention includes in its definition of intolerance “disrespect, rejection, or contempt . . . [for the] opinions” of others, while Article 4 states that the “duties of the [35 signatory] states” include “ [to] prevent, eliminate, prohibit, and punish, in accordance with their constitutional norms . . . all acts and manifestations of discrimination and intolerance.” But what is “disrespect”? What constitutes “rejection” of an opinion? Is, say, discussion of the connection between Islam and violence punishable intolerance? There are no clear answers to these questions, because the censors never define their terms. The vagueness deliberately encourages self-censorship by communicating an implicit warning: caveat loquens, let the speaker beware.
…the Guardian’s website is thataway. Honestly, they are usually very good at this sort of thing, although even their best writers would struggle to inject much tension into this episode. Before I head up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, I shall raise a glass to the humbling of the Scottish National Party and to whichever stubborn old reactionary kept British votes retro.
Eye-catching data from this article, by Nicolai Heering, on UK anti-money laudering regulations (AMLR) in the UK:
About 170,000 individuals are being debanked in the UK every year due to the AMLR. By comparison, only some 1,000 individuals are actually convicted of money laundering. Thus, the remaining 169,000 individuals are done a very serious injustice as being without a bank account has profoundly negative consequences for most people.
And
How can that be resolved? The electorate needs to understand the scale of the costs of AMLR compliance: that they themselves are ultimately paying those costs, that the AMLR have little to commend them by way of crime-reducing results, and that the AMLR are causing vast numbers of innocent people to be debanked every year. Only then are the politicians likely to sit up and listen.
The article refers to this study from the Institute of Economic Affairs about money laundering controls, debanking, and the perverse consequences of forms of regulation.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that because banks are not purely free enterprise institutions, but are umbilically linked to the central bank as a lender of last resort, and hedged around and protected by all manner of rules, they are almost obliged to treat clients poorly. There is nothing resembling client confidentiality. Under AML rules, bank staff are required, on pain of serious penalties, to report supposedly suspicious transactions. It means that in many cases that people are obliged to prove they aren’t doing anything wrong. And add to that the cookie-cutter approach embedded in a lot of modern “regtech” software, it is easy to see how you can end up with stories of tens of thousands of innocent people “de-banked” for no good reason.
The story last summer of how Reform leader Nigel Farage (he wasn’t leader then, but a GB News presenter) was de-banked by Coutts, (see my related thoughts here) and how evidence surfaced that he was ousted in part because the bank appeared to dislike his views, and also because of possible issues with his being a Politically Exposed Person, hasn’t vanished. There remain serious issues about how banks treat clients. And with a Labour government likely days away from achieving office, I doubt some of the more outrageous examples of “debanking” will be dealt with. As ever, the current Conservative government appears to have missed an opportunity to take decisive action.
A philosophy student overheard through the wall of his room saying ‘veganism is wrong’ and ‘gender fluidity is stupid’ was threatened with expulsion by his university, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Robert Ivinson said he was disciplined after a student next door in halls of residence at Exeter University heard the comments then complained he had been offensive and ‘transphobic’.
Mr Ivinson, who expressed the views in a phone call to a friend, was hauled before university officials and put on a ‘behavioural contract’ for the rest of his studies.
Mr Ivinson acknowledges that a legitimate part of the complaint against him was that he was speaking too loudly in the phone call in question so that noise was coming through the wall. However he says that the university hearing refused to separate the issues of him making too much noise and what he said in a private conversation being deemed offensive.
Though Mr Ivinson appears perfectly reasonable, indeed likeable, in his video, I would like to believe that there is something missing from his account – because I do not want to believe that a British university can have fallen so far from what a university is meant to be. The Mail on Sunday article says “Exeter University was approached for comment but did not respond.” I shall be most interested to see what the University’s response turns out to be.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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