If Mark Zuckerberg has his way, a new age of freedom has dawned this year. This is how the Meta boss, master of the gigantic social media networks Facebook and Instagram, is selling his programmatic change for the digital spearheads of his company.
There should be fewer controls so that expression of opinion is no longer suppressed. In concrete terms, this means: hate messages are no longer intensively sorted out and extreme opinions are no longer made invisible. Instead, users should take care of anything gross and dangerous by marking it and commenting on it in separate fields.
These are methods that haven’t worked in the past, and Facebook was still a platform for students and Instagram was a photo network. No question: it’s not about a more flexible assessment of unpopular content, but rather about less intervention.
Everyone can decide for themselves whether this is a question of the zeitgeist becoming blind to civilizing measures or due to pressure from the re-elected US President Donald Trump. Zuckerberg apparently judged the path that Elon Musk took after buying Twitter on the short messaging service, which was then renamed X, to be successful.
Mark Zuckerberg once again lacks tact
He even echoes its rhetoric when he raves about governments and “legacy media” censoring people. This is how flawless right-wing populists usually speak. At the same time, Zuckerberg also stomps on the by no means easy discourse on the topics of gender equality and migration, which require a great deal of tolerance for ambiguity, when he says that there is too little neutrality in the evaluation of contributions.
There’s no need to kid yourself that the wind on the Internet could soon be blowing harsher – especially because those who have made themselves comfortable in alternative Internet forums in recent years are now smelling the dawn. Supported by Internet bots and increasingly powerful AI, fake news threats could arise that even Mark Zuckerberg cannot yet imagine.
If the spiritual leader of social networks dreams of more freedom, then it means that he wants to avoid the responsibility he has for hundreds of millions of people.