(Preview) Meta’s Moderation Changes, Tech’s Evolving Political Calculus, The Importance and Difficulty of Maintaining Principles on the Internet

Meta’s new approach to moderation questions, the context for an apparent shift to the right among tech leadership, and lessons from the last several years of moderation challenges and mistakes. At the end: Mark Zuckerberg offers his assessment of Apple in the modern era.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Well, and it is unfortunate since Snapchat came up with the idea to have big bad Facebook come through and just take what it wants and implement it at a much bigger scale. But from a strategy standpoint, elegant and effective. So, well done, Zuck. So, can I explain?

• 0:26Ben Thompson?

  Yes, please do. Why did you consider this analogy poignant?

• 0:32Andrew Sharp?

  Okay, so I reread the piece. You start that piece by comparing or by complimenting Samsung for how well they aped the iPhone design and that in that execution.

• 0:43Ben Thompson?

  Oh, that's always been one of my all times eggs because everyone always complains about Samsung copying the iPhone. I'm like, look at every other phone company pre iPhone. They're all dead. It's like, sometimes aping is the right thing to do.

• 0:56Andrew Sharp?

  Right. And so you write, "To be sure, the physical constraints of hardware lead much more quickly to one ideal solution, that ideal solution being the iPhone form factor. The infinite malleability of software seems to give a much more expansive canvas for doing something original. And yet, even if it is possible to build just about anything, the ultimate constraint is the attention of the end user. What do they actually want to do? And does your product help them do it?" And then you go on to compliment Meta and the Instagram Stories strategy. But the idea there of having an ideal solution or an ideal framework, even in the software space, that reminds me of the speech questions

• 1:39Andrew Sharp?

  here because a bunch of people in the media have framed the Meta changes as Zuckerberg bending the knee to the right. But number one, it's not Meta's fault that having a bias toward more speech and not less speech is now conservative-coded. And two, it's possible that this is Meta just moving closer to a better, smarter answer for how platforms of that size should approach speech questions.

• 2:10Andrew Sharp?

  And Musk came up with a community notes approach and it just works and it's how a company like Meta should approach all these dilemmas. And yeah, and so that's ultimately like the parallel there is it's just a better idea and Meta is recognizing it and deploying it.

• 2:30Ben Thompson?

  Yeah.

• 2:30Andrew Sharp?

  Does that make sense?

• 2:31Ben Thompson?

  It does. I think Community Notes did precede Musk, but it's one of those things like where I would whenever I praise Satya Nadella for the way he changed Microsoft and like his first big move was to put Microsoft Office on iPad, even though it wasn't ready for Windows eight, sort of back then, the sort of touch interface. And, and I would always get pushed back from Microsoft people like, hey, that was developed under Steve Ballmer. I'm like, I don't care who it was developed with. There is a matter of, of the resonance and the way that you're actually changing the priority and making it the focus that no, this is actually what we're going to do. We're going to be cross-platform. We're going to meet our customers where they are. We're not going to handicap some products to favor the other one.

• 3:11Ben Thompson?

  You know, this sort of tail weighing the dogs situation that Microsoft got in. And I think that's fair for Community Notes. It was a thing before Musk took over. He made it into sort of a much larger thing and in conjunction with wiping out their sort of fact checking sort of apparatus. And yeah, I mean, the like, nothing is perfect. Let's start out number one. This is the overarching point to land and we'll get into lots of people's pushback and objections along those lines. But the reality is we're dealing with stuff that's super messy and there is no right answer. And in that context, you have to sort of have our priority stack, like what is sort of actually at the top, what works?

• 3:52Ben Thompson?

  And for social media, when you have this challenge, this scale challenge of anyone can post, anyone can put anything. The solutions that work have to be similarly scalable. And, and I think that the, the, and you, you did say one thing earlier, as long as I'm on the correct Andrew train here about they got rid of their army of fact checkers. The way Facebook tried to work around this problem of what we don't want to be in the truth. Business is they outsource the fact checking.

• 4:22Andrew Sharp?

  Right. Fact checking contractors, correct?

• 4:25Ben Thompson?

  That's right. Yeah. Which, which, you know, and so you had all these like, you know, traditional media organizations that spun up entire orgs that were focused on fact checking. You have people whose like career was to be official fact checkers. And the problem is that, I mean, there's a broader discussion about the way social media tends to form sort of consensus thinking. And I think it's been most pervasive in the traditional media. And you had this sort of imposition of a particular point of view on, and this isn't just, it's most pertinent in the US because the US are, culture wars are so visible.

• 5:06Ben Thompson?

  And basically the spectacle for the entire world, and one of the greatest entertainment products of all time is US culture wars.

• 5:12Andrew Sharp?

  I mean, The ultimate reality TV show.

• 5:13Ben Thompson?

  People very busy over Christmas break. I can tell you that much and sort of it, it, it still is. But the, the, the reality, but it's also a worldwide issue. And, and you're, you're the different places and different people have different value systems. And it's a really hard problem on how you're going to manage that and organize that. And I think the thing with the, the community note system is you could critique it by saying there is an abdication of accountability and that who knows who's, you know, who, who are these actual community note checkers? But actually it, it's also a better representation of those being served. It's sort of a self policing sort of mechanism that I think works well. And there's lots of interesting things about how X does it.

• 5:57Ben Thompson?

  Different people can propose community notes, but it has to be come to some sort of consensus. And there's like a tracking of the note takers and what they approve and disprove. And there has to be some aspect of people that regularly disagree, have to agree on a particular note for it to work. So it's trying to get against like one of the challenges of social media is you get sort of this brigading effect where people will get groups together. You know, we've seen this with like, uh, to, to downvote a particular post or to report.

• 6:23Andrew Sharp?

  Sure.

• 6:24Ben Thompson?

  This was a challenge when you got into the reporting system, like reporting people for objectionable speech. Or DMCA

• 6:31Andrew Sharp?

  Or people do, you know, bomb people's Yelp pages and whatnot.

• 6:36Ben Thompson?

  That's right.

• 6:36Andrew Sharp?

  It's been a problem on the internet since the internet came into existence.

• 6:40Ben Thompson?

  That's right. So Community Notes is not perfect. Like, it can cause problems in this regard. But there is something, as you were sort of feeling in the dark, to solve these various issues that come with scale. I do think as a general principle, scalable solutions are going to be the better ones in the long run. And Community Notes is scalable in a positive way, in a way that empowering a Mandarin class to rule from on high what's true or what's not, turned out to not be, I think, a very good fit for a network of billions of people.

• 7:17Andrew Sharp?

  Right. Well, and I think you said a couple of things there. One, Community Notes is not a perfect solution. And there are no perfect solutions to what are just really, really difficult problems that, again, people have been trying to solve and grapple with for 30 years on the internet. And now the scale is much larger, but a lot of these problems aren't necessarily new. And Community Notes may be the best of several bad options for moderating at scale. And the other factor here is that we just watched in the wake of the Trump election in 2016, like, the moderation apparatuses that were developed in those years.

• 7:58Andrew Sharp?

  COVID happened and was like this massive test for the net impact of those policies. And I would say there were some pretty resounding failures there, which Zuckerberg was honest about. But like, whether you're talking about vaccine information and whether it was essential to get the vaccine, the origins of COVID, the impact of school closures on kids, the way COVID was transmitted. And these were all like very contested issues. And the voices that dissented from establishment media consensus were pretty frequently suppressed. And it turns out a lot of those voices may have been right. And so whether you can remove Biden and Trump from the equation.

• 8:42Andrew Sharp?

  It just seems clear that like over the past eight years. Expanding the definition of harmful speech and misinformation. Has not achieved its intended objectives because obviously. Vaccine skepticism is at an all time high after the vaccine approach.

• 9:01Ben Thompson?

  This is the one that really bugs me because I was like, you know. When the mandate stuff came out, I was like flipping out. This is going to be a disaster and the reason it's going to be a disaster. Is has nothing to do with COVID. It has to do with we we have really important vaccines that work. And the way this is going to translate broadly is into skepticism of all vaccines. And that's exactly what we see. There's numbers coming out about the relative penetration of like the measles vaccine and things like that. Way down just from even five years ago. And that's like, and these were. You couldn't even argue, I you can even argue this at the time, right? Like, like, like something went terribly wrong.

• 9:44Ben Thompson?

  And there was in all those moderation debates between 2016 and 2020. It was a hard position as someone that for 98% of the time, and we can maybe get to the 2%. I was super hardcore, look, free speech matters like like it actually is important. And you were always sort of arguing in theoreticals. Like, yes, the harms are visible that you're trying to limit. But there's systemic harms you're introducing to the system. If you don't allow free speech, if you don't allow dissent, even if 95% of the stuff you want to do is actually wrong. Right? The 5% is really, really important. And I do have a degree of frustration with folks that don't look back in COVID and realize. It wasn't theoretical anymore.

• 10:28Andrew Sharp?

  Exactly. No longer an abstract argument. It became very literal.

• 10:32Ben Thompson?

  The school thing's crazy, right? Like, like, I still talk to people today. That don't understand the age skew in COVID deaths. And the fact that the majority of COVID deaths were people of over 80 years old. And it would, you know, the risk to kids was very, and you think if you just zoom out and had a theory. Discussion about what as a society do we want to prioritize and what is most important? I think everyone would say kids are the most important, right? Like that's our future. Like you, there's lots of cliches sort of about that. And yet, at the time, that discussion could barely even be had. And now we're reaping the consequences.

• 11:11Ben Thompson?

  And the challenge with this is you could always find examples of bad speech, of stuff that you wanted to sort of censor and limit. This is goes back to our bit about stuff stays on the internet forever. And by the way, there's search. So you, it was the easiest sort of story to write in the world. You go to Twitter, you go to the search bar, you type in something objectionable, you find 20 tweets that say that and you write a story about, yeah, there is this terrible trend on Twitter, people type out XYZ. And the problem is that, number one, that's not necessarily representative. And number two, you created this, like, I just, this has to be, how can people not see this as a wake up call where you have number one,

• 11:57Ben Thompson?

  once you have the means of censoring people centrally, people reached out for it sort of desperately. Like, like the, the, the commitment to free speech turned out to be a matter of capability, not necessarily a matter of principle. And then number two, the fact that you could find bad stuff trivially was not dispositive about the overall value or overall sort of discussion. And now we're reaping the consequences, we're reaping the consequences for years and years. When in 2017, you had to say, look, in theory, this is why you need free speech. So I'm going to support it. Now today, you can point to evidence. And I do think there's people that need to update their priors, like, like.

• 12:42Andrew Sharp?

  That's the thing. Yeah, I mean, that's where I am just super sympathetic to the changes that Meta is putting forward now because the key point is in retrospect, even if you agree with all the intentions underlying the former moderation regime, the goals of those policies were not being achieved. They were policing COVID vaccine skepticism, and there's now an uptick in skepticism of all vaccines. Trump was kicked off major social media platforms, and he just won the election and was more popular in basically every demographic in the United States. So whatever they were trying to do with those policies was not being done effectively and was causing more problems than it was solving.

• 13:25Ben Thompson?

  That's a really important point. None of this worked. So what are we trying to deflect? Like, why? You have to update with information, even if you thought something different at one time. Look at the evidence of the last few years, like all the and a lot of the progress on social issues that people felt needed to be defended through sort of censorship. All that progress happened in a world without censorship, right? Like, everything sort of backslid while there was the these sort of strict controls going on. And I don't know, there's like, it almost ties into like some of our parenting advice and like the way to sort of like, like, like, like, think about the world.

• 14:04Andrew Sharp?

  All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Strategery and the Strategery Plus bundle. Check it out. And if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharptech.fm.