Disclaimer: The following is a transcript of this video episode. It has been edited for grammar and clarity using an AI tool.
In India, we have this term called Godi Media, where a mainstream media outlet or a television channel or a newspaper, usually a Hindi newspaper (but English newspapers have also started doing this), has bent over backward to accommodate the needs of whoever is in power. This means that a politician, a minister, or a political party with a certain agenda asks them to treat certain topics as things that should not be spread, and certain topics as things that should be spread. They bend over backward to accommodate this. They do anything they can to make the minister, the political party, or anyone who follows that political ideology happy. They don’t care about anything other than the fact that their profit margins might be affected by those in power being unfriendly towards them, leading to the potential loss of government ads or some such issues.
Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who’s at the helm of Meta Platforms (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and whatnot), has decided to go full-on Godi Media. In anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to power, he is making some bizarre changes to the social media platforms he owns and controls. I am not complaining that Facebook is going to end. I’m a huge fan of the current social networks ending and being replaced by something more valuable—something that is genuinely a social network. But even I did not anticipate that this manner of suicide would be committed by someone like Mark Zuckerberg.
Let me tell you what all he’s doing to Meta, and then you can tell me if you think this is better for the company or for social media. The first move is this: Meta now allows people to call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill. I don’t even know where to begin with this. You have a social network, and a huge number of people who use the social network are non-binary, non-heterosexual, or non-gender normative. They rely on social media as a place to express themselves because their family, friends, and the places where they live are not friendly toward their existence. They have managed to build communities online by making use of the social network. But now, the social network is saying, “We are going to subject them to the same kind of bullying that they experience in the real world.” Meta is not going to protect them.
There was even a news item about certain themes in chat that allowed people to express their LGBTQ+ identities, and now those themes are being removed because Mark Zuckerberg is afraid that homophobes, transphobes, and others will get offended by Meta allowing people to express their gender identity. Even people within Meta are unhappy about this because they fear that this is not only a terrible thing to do but might also backlash and harm the company. This is understandable. But Facebook has never stood on its own two feet when it comes to relationships with those in power. If Mark Zuckerberg can bend over backward to accommodate the Hindutva crowd in India, it’s not surprising that his subservience to those in power would eventually affect his business decisions in the U.S.
Another recent news item discusses how Meta is now encouraging the creation of AI bots on its platforms. Soon, users will interact with AI bots online the same way they interact with real humans. This raises a fundamental question: What does “social” mean in social media? Is it interactions between humans and machines, machines and humans, or humans and humans enabled by machines? I may be old-fashioned, but I come from an era where “social” meant people talking to each other. I also recall TikTok’s assertion that Facebook would never compete with them because Facebook’s model is the social graph while TikTok’s model is entertainment. Meta seems to be veering toward TikTok’s direction—becoming an entertainment platform rather than a social network.
We are already talking about the death of the follower. If you’re unfamiliar, look up a talk by Patreon CEO Jack Conte called “The Death of the Follower”. He explains how, in the early 2010s, the “follow” became a fundamental internet architecture, allowing users to follow creators they liked. But now, if you log onto the homepage of any platform, the recommended content is not what you subscribed to but what the algorithm thinks you’d like. This is akin to TV, where you had no choice but to watch whatever was on. The internet was supposed to be revolutionary because it let you decide what you watched and engaged with. Meta’s current trajectory is reversing that trend.
Another troubling development is Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to relax hate speech restrictions on Meta’s platforms. Previously, there was at least the possibility of action against hate speech, but now such speech will be permitted more freely. As someone from India, I can attest to Facebook and Instagram’s poor track record in addressing hate speech. Practically every time hate speech is reported, it is deemed non-violative of their community guidelines. Furthermore, there have been reports of individuals sympathetic to certain political parties infiltrating Facebook to reduce the reach of pages critical of the government while ignoring hateful conduct by those favorable to the ruling party.
These changes do not appear to be mere policy decisions; they are political decisions by a CEO attempting to keep his company afloat under a politically unpredictable American president. Mark Zuckerberg must surely understand that these decisions are not the way for Meta to survive. Either he has given up on Facebook and Instagram remaining what they are, or he is accelerating the death of social media—a prospect I am not entirely against. Social media, as it exists today, is neither healthy individually nor socially. If Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions lead to the demise of platforms like Facebook, then perhaps it’s for the best.
Thank you for listening. I’ll see you in the next one.
