Two members of a committee tasked with ruling on content disputes at Facebook, Instagram and other platforms at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have accused the tech giant’s CEO of bowing to President-elect Donald Trump.
“Meta hasn’t gifted control of its platform to Donald Trump, but its behavior this week suggests a company which is extremely keen not to displease him,” wrote journalists Alan Rusbridger and Khaled Mansour, who serve on Meta’s Oversight Board, in the magazine Prospect.
Rusbridger is a former editor-in-chief of The Guardian and Mansour is a former UN diplomat-turned-journalist.
Their criticism comes in the wake of Meta’s plans to axe its fact-checking program and replace it with a community notes offering not so different from the one on MAGA billionaire Elon Musk’s X.
Rusbridger and Mansour, nodding to Trump, wrote that Zuckerberg’s video announcing the moderation changes “felt as if it was intended for an audience of one.”
Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and appointed several of the president-elect’s allies to senior positions, including naming UFC CEO and longtime Trump pal Dana White to its board of directors.
The Oversight Board, created in 2018, is a quasi-judiciary body, originally described by Zuckerberg as a “Supreme Court,” that mediates content disputes and is not directly involved in business operations.
That Meta might want to calcify Zuckerberg’s newly-empowered “audience of one” is not unsurprising: Trump previously attacked Facebook, Meta’s largest platform, for its fact-checking and content moderation, blasting the social network last year as “a true Enemy of the People!”
That came after Trump was banned from Facebook and Instagram in 2021 following the January 6 insurrection, a decision he used to bash Big Tech.
The Oversight Board upheld the decision but cut his suspension period to two years from an indefinite shelving. His accounts were fully restored last year in advance of the 2024 presidential election.
“No-one is pretending that Meta’s decision to think again about its approach to content moderation and fact-checking was other than political,” Rusbridger and Mansour added.
They also warned Zuckerberg that bending the knee to Trump could risk catastrophe, noting “misinformation, disinformation and hate speech—including dehumanisation—can very much kill.”
They cited, among other examples, Myanmar, where Amnesty International says Facebook “proactively” promoted violence against the Rohingya people, boosting propaganda during a military campaign that saw widespread killings and rape carried out against the ethnic minority.
“If left to proliferate unchecked, misinformation and disinformation also undermine public trust in general and allow all forms of conspiratorial views to dominate,“ Rusbridger and Mansour wrote. “We know how the vilification of whole groups of people based on their national, ethnic, religious or class background can lead to real-world harm. Meta knows that from its years of experience.”
In particular they questioned Meta’s new strategy to adopt community, which they said could fail in “raging conflicts where communities are torn apart, extremely polarised or under unprecedented existential pressure” and where said violence could be emboldened by “incitement and disinformation on pervasive social media platforms.”
The two stopped short of saying there is any imminent harm, noting it will take a year to implement the changes in the United States along and that there have been no indications about whether the reforms will be exported and impact Meta’s hundreds of millions of users abroad.
