IIt’s been two years since Donald Trump was kicked out of Meta, but now he’s back. The company’s rationale for allowing the former president to return to Facebook and Instagram – that the threat has diminished – seems to ignore that in the two years since Trump’s ban has not changed, only that his reach has shrunk.
Last week, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced that soon Trump will be able to post on Instagram and Facebook. The company said that “the risk has decreased sufficiently” in the two years since the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021 to allow the ban to be lifted.
What you may not have noticed, except through media reports, was Trump’s response. That’s because the former US president posted it on Truth Social, his own social network that he withdrew from after being banned from others. And he is effectively behind a wall for web users, because the company does not accept new registrations. On that platform, Trump is said to have fewer than 5 million followers, compared with 34 million and nearly 88 million he had on Facebook and Twitter, respectively.
The Meta ban meant that Trump would have no space on his platforms during the 2022 US midterm elections, but would it have been any different if Trump had a larger audience? As Dan Milmo has detailed, almost half of the posts on Trump’s Truth Social account in the weeks after the midterm Pushed voter fraud claims or amplified QAnon accounts or content.. But you wouldn’t know that unless you were on that platform, or reading a news report about it like this one.
Given a larger audience, will Trump resume his Protagonist role in online discourse (a role that new Twitter owner Elon Musk has taken on in recent months)? Or has his influence diminished? This is the bet that Meta is taking.
When Musk lifted Trump’s Twitter ban in November after a user poll won narrowly, it was easy to read the former president’s snub of the gesture as a burn on the tech CEO. But it seems increasingly likely that Meta’s decision on whether to reinstate him loomed large in Trump’s mind. Earlier this month, NBC reported that Trump advisers had sent a letter to Meta calling for the ban to be lifted, saying it “drastically distorts and inhibits public discourse.” If Trump had gone back to Twitter and started reposting what he had posted on Truth Social, there would have been more pressure on Meta to uphold the ban (leaving aside the agreement that Trump has with his own social media company who keeps his posts exclusive on Truth Social for several hours).
Twitter lifting the ban and Trump not tweeting at all gave Meta enough coverage.
the finances
There is also the possible financial reasoning. Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said that Facebook is “a dying platform” and that restoring Trump is about hanging on to relevance and revenue.
For months, Trump has been posting on Truth Social about Meta’s poor financial performance and, in part, trying to link it to his no longer being with Facebook. Meta has lost more than US$80bn in market value and laid off thousands of workers last year, as the company sought to halt a declining user base and loss of revenue after Apple made privacy changes to its software (£).
But what about the ‘railings’?
Meta’s justification for restoring Trump’s account is that there are new “guardrails” that could result in him being banned again for the most egregious policy violations for anywhere from a month to two years. But that’s likely only for the most serious infractions, like glorifying those who commit acts of violence. Clegg indicated that if Trump posts QAnon-adjacent content, for example, his reach will be limited on those posts.
The ban itself was a pretty sufficient scope limiter, but we’ll have to see what happens if Trump starts posting again. He draft unpublished document The January 6 committee staff report, reported by the Washington Post last week, was quite revealing about Meta and social media companies in general. He claims that both Facebook and Twitter, under his previous administration, were sensitive to claims that conservative political speech was being stifled. “Fear of reprisals and accusations of censorship by the political right compromised the policy, the process and the decision-making. This was especially true on Facebook,” the document states.
“In one case, senior leadership personally intervened to prevent right-wing publishers from demoting their content after receiving too many notices from independent fact-checkers.
“After the election, they debated whether they should change their fact-checking policy on former world leaders to accommodate President Trump.”
Those “railings” don’t look particularly reassuring, do they?
Is the AI really coming for its job?
Layoffs continue to affect the media and companies seek to reduce costs. So it was disheartening for new reporters in particular to learn that BuzzFeed plans to use AI like ChatGPT “to create content rather than writers.”
(Full disclosure: I worked at BuzzFeed News before joining The Guardian in 2019, but it’s been so long I’m not familiar with any of their thoughts on AI.)
But maybe it’s too early to despair. Anyone who’s used free AI for writing will know that it’s okay, but it’s not great, so the concern that BuzzFeed will plunge into those waters seems overblown, at least for now.
In an interview with Semafor, BuzzFeed technology reporter Katie Notopoulos explained that the tools are not meant to replace the quiz-building work that writers do now, but to create new quizzes unlike what already exists. “On one hand,” she said, “I want to try to explain that this isn’t some evil plan to replace me with AI. But on the other… maybe we’ll let Wall Street believe that for a while.”
That seems to be where AI is now: not a replacement for a trained person, just a tool.
The Widest TechScape
