Screenshot from TRAILER OF THE FILM THAT WILL NEVER EXIST: PHONY WARS
I tend not to do anything too current-newsy in this space, as it’s not always relevant to my work, but yesterday was full of Zuck announcing he’s doing away with fact-checking and moderation across Meta’s social media platforms.
I was put in mind of Neal Stephenson’s FALL:
In this new world, America has split itself in half. In the rural parts of the country, there’s “Ameristan,” where the poor and uneducated live steeped in misinformation, hoarding ammunition for a war that will never come and crucifying those they deem to be heathens.
But the coasts and the cities are full of wealthy elites who pay to have professional editors weed out fake news from their digital feeds, and regard the rest of the country with a kind of disgusted anthropological fascination.
The people most at risk from misinformation, brain rot and slop are about to get drowned in it, I assume.
Zuckerberg also suggested that Meta would work with the Trump administration “to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
He also unveiled plans to base the U.S. content review teams in Texas, rather than in California, “where there is less concern about the bias in our teams.”
Some people already have teams running their social media, running interference on DMs as well as posting etc. The apps don’t have the sort of API access that’d let you have your own app showing your edited social media, as far as I know. For some fields of work, it’s considered a privilege to not have to use social media. (Thinking back to this NYT profile on Franzen.) Perhaps, for the elites, social media is something that happens over there, where you can’t see it, where the Other People are.