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Mark Zuckerberg's big overture to Trump
00:18:55
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes this week to how his company will moderate posts on Facebook and Instagram. Meta’s current fact-checking system resulted in political bias and censorship, Zuckerberg said, so the company is moving to a looser model — just as President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Cato Institute scholar and Meta Oversight Board member John Samples joins host Steven Overly to explain why he thinks the changes are necessary, if imperfect, and why more are likely to come.
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Stephen Overlea
Hey, welcome to POLITICO Tech today's Thursday, January 9th. I'm Stephen Overle. By now you've likely heard that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making big changes to how the company moderates posts on Facebook and Instagram. Meta is eliminating fact checkers, promoting political content it once shunned, and filtering out fewer posts automatically, even if they contain, quote, bad stuff. Here's Zuckerberg announcing the changes on Tuesday.
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Mark Zuckerberg
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far now.
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Stephen Overlea
The timing of his announcement wasn't lost on anyone. Politicians and activists on the right and left were quick to point out that Zuckerberg is rolling out these changes just as President Elect Donald Trump returns to the White House. Trump has repeatedly accused TikTok of censorship and anti conservative bias. He's even threatened to jail Zuckerberg himself. And many of the comments Zuckerberg made earlier this week echoed conservative talking points that Mehta once decried as false.
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Mark Zuckerberg
After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in.
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Stephen Overlea
The U.S. now Zuckerberg wants to enlist Trump in a global fight against foreign governments that are forcing Meta and other social media platforms to remove harmful content. Shortly after Zuckerberg's video was released, I called up John Samples. John is a vice president and First Amendment scholar at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, and he serves on Meta's oversight board, a quasi independent group that advises Meta on major content moderation decisions. On the show today, John tells me why he thinks Meta's changes are necessary, though not necessarily perfect, and why this likely won't be the last time Zuckerberg reacts to the Shifting winds of politics. Here's our conversation. John, welcome to Politico Tech.
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John Samples
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
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Stephen Overlea
Of course. I appreciate you being here. So, in addition to your role at the Cato Institute, you've been part of Meta's oversight board since it was founded a little over four years ago. Now, did you know these changes were coming or did you offer any input on them?
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John Samples
No, I mean, actually, Meta made a point of making the oversight board independent. And what I found out over was that people who would, when I was a sort of think tank scholar, people who would talk to me about Meta wouldn't talk to me after I went on the oversight board. So that told me it was pretty strongly enforced. There was a large wall between the oversight board and Meta. So I got up this morning, like everyone else, and said, what the devil is that?
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Stephen Overlea
Got it, Got it. So, as you said, this oversight board, it is independent. So are you limited in any way, or do we get your full opinions today?
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John Samples
I think you'll get my full opinions with the understanding I don't speak for the oversight board. I certainly don't speak for Meta or the Cato Institute. I just speak for myself.
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Stephen Overlea
Got it? No, that's all I'm looking for. But, you know, given how long you've been studying these issues and given your role as part of the oversight board, I think you've had a closer look than most at Meta's content moderation practices. Did you think these changes announced today were necessary?
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John Samples
Oh, I'm certain they were necessary, and I think they probably will turn out to properly understood. They will turn out to be a good thing. I think Zuckerberg's comment in his video is correct, that they went too far. I think also the whole pandemic experience where Zuckerberg came to believe that Meta had really been abused by the Biden administration, that they had used their leverage over Meta to do more censorship than was necessary. Right. And I think he was somewhat unhappy about that and irritated at a minimum. And so I think you saw part of that reflected today. He wanted to sort of get out from under that. You have to say the pandemic was a period when fact checking as an undertaking was at its height in Meta. The actual truth about fact checking is that experts would always say until then was it doesn't scale. Right. So what that means is Meta has to pass judgment on about 6 million, 7 million pieces of content every day. And you're obviously not going through fact checkers on that. There's so Much so many decisions to be made that it's very hard to do in that regard. The big thing that Zuckerberg said today was, you know, we're going to make require higher confidence to take down speech. Remember, well over 90% of the violations at Meta are detected by machines and they're never reviewed by humans. Right. So that judgment about confidence that there's a violation is very important. There's a big difference between a 90% confidence and a 95% or a 99% confidence. The higher the confidence has to be, the more speech stays up for content moderation. I think the single most important thing he said was that, and that there'll be higher confidence required to take stuff down. And that means a lot more stuff is going to stay up. Some of it will be harmful in some sense, so they may have to fiddle with it and work through it in time, but for the time being, it means there's going to be less suppression of speech.
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Stephen Overlea
So it sounds like the system that they had in place you didn't see as scalable or very functional.
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John Samples
Right. And there was a third part of it, it's third shortcoming, which I think Zuckerberg got at today, which was that it didn't for part of the population in the United States in particular, but in Europe also, it did not increase the credibility of the content moderation. What it did is essentially people, not just people from the Trump side of the right, but also the non Trumpsters, really didn't believe that this was going to be a kind of neutral undertaking. You would tell people, Mehta would tell people that fact checkers have said this isn't right. And then it really evolved into taking stuff down and at the behest of fact checkers. And so I think it ran its course. And it doesn't really, it's really, it was a problem of the past. And Zuckerberg's most interesting comments today, I think are about the future, not about the past.
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Stephen Overlea
Right. Well, you know, Zuckerberg is making these changes after Trump's election win and just before he takes office. You know, a lot of the reaction that I've seen, I'll say from both progressives and conservatives, has been that he is doing this now to appease Trump. Is that your take on this?
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John Samples
I think it's important to keep in mind that people have multiple motivations to do stuff. I mean, Zuckerberg's top problem as a manager or as the final decision maker at Meta is he's got to think about shareholders. He's supposed to maximize the value of the company for them. Because of the way and because of the politics of our time, because this is Meta and others are basically the public square in many respects. There's a lot of speech going on there. You get caught up in these political conflicts. And so he has to think about that. However, I also think that Zuckerberg has a real commitment to freedom of speech that's not necessarily shared by everyone in the company, but he sets the tone there. And I think, as I said earlier, that what happened during the pandemic, he thought the government was abusive, basically did things, then Meta responded by doing things and taking things down that they should not have done. He also mentions a couple of things which are very important. One is Latin America, where there's unknown, you know, secret proceedings can require you to take down, can require Meta to take down stuff. But I think the big issue here was Europe and their regulatory apparatus called the Digital Services Act. And the Digital Services act is coming up with a speech codes basically that they will expect Meta to follow. And those speech codes are backed by, for meta, up to $8 billion a year in fines. And what you see here in Zucker's comments today was, well, look, we hope to work. We're an American company. We hope the new administration will work with us to try to stop this censorship that the Europeans and the essentially the Brazilians want. And then there's the problem of China too. So Zuckerberg is positioning himself as an American company with American interest in foreign affairs. And that's a very different thing than trying to placate particularly the Europeans. I mean, I think that conflict between American companies and the European Commission is going to get hotter as we go down the pike.
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Stephen Overlea
There was some of the language in his rollout of the changes here and from other Meta executives as well. You know, referring to their fact checking system as, quote, having too much political bias or too much censorship, which really those Comments struck me as in some ways an about face because Meta and other tech companies have denied in the past kind of political anti conservative bias. Did that seem like a significant admission to you?
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John Samples
It's very significant, yeah. Because I mean essentially in the past they were a lot like a lot of people and institutions in this space, which is they referred to a process. So they would say we only take down things that the fact checking organizations and they, you know, the fact checking organizations have rules and they belong to this international fact checking network and so on. So you've got an appeal to expertise. And so it's significant to say that expertise can also be politically biased. It doesn't necessarily need to be always completely neutral. I do think the real problem here is they may have concluded that in cases of egregious bias, but I think the problem is it just wasn't believable for the people that he needed to have their belief. They needed credibility not just with the left side of America, but also the right side. And you weren't going to get 100% credibility, but you've got something like 100% distrust. So the fact checking was meant to help with that and ultimately they concluded that it didn't.
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Stephen Overlea
Do you think one of the motivations here was political cover? I mean Trump has been very critical of Zuckerberg and of Meta. He's obviously about to be the president in some ways. You know, I think there's a way to read this that they're trying to get Trump off their back before he's in power.
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John Samples
Well, they were trying to get, you can look back in with Biden. They were trying to do things to get Biden off their back before he was in power. I think Trump has three basic problems with Meta apart from this general sense of an animus against conservatives. One was Zuckerberg himself gave a bunch of money and I believe in a public spirited way to try to help with election administration in 2020. I mean millions and millions of dollars. The Trump people interpreted that as intervening in the election, trying to help Biden. The number two thing was of course the Hunter Biden situation two weeks before the election, which meht not to allow people to spread that across the platform.
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Stephen Overlea
Right.
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John Samples
And then of course ultimately Trump himself after January 6th was taken off the platform for a couple of years. So there's the, you're in this context, there's these problems going back. And so yes, they have to consider we want to stay on the good side of everybody politically and it's very, very hard to do because the, the political people tend to think, you know, anything that's done is to help the other side. So it' hard to overestimate how difficult tasks Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg have in dealing with this and people in the past have had. It's very hard. So there's going to be some zigs and zags. I think part of this is a zig, but part of it is, I mean, you can't just say, well, we'll continue doing what we're doing and see what the Trump administration does to us. Let's see what those antitrust movements look like. And there's 10, it's a trillion dollar company, there's tens of billions of shareholder stake here. So he's got to think about that. But I do think there are other things. And in some ways, this might ultimately be the political system working kind of like it's supposed to, which is Meta has a lot of scope for action, a lot of scope for deciding what to take down. But they could go too far one way and then they get political, and then maybe they go too far toward Trump this time, and then down the line we'll get a pushback the other way. Right. So that's the most optimistic part of all this. The real risk is that they end up being responsive or having to be responsive to the Trump administration in precisely the same way they were responsive to Biden, which is not something any of us should want, really.
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Stephen Overlea
That's what I was actually going to ask you about, because as you said, one of the arguments that's been made here is this is ultimately meant to foster, you know, free speech, free expression. There are some folks, though, who have sort of argued, you know, here you have a company changing their policies, presumably to appease politician. Is that potentially cause for concern from sort of a free speech perspective?
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John Samples
Well, in the American context, it's a complicated matter, right? Because if the alternative is that Europe comes up with these kind of European standards and makes Meta follow them, European standards on free speech, as we now see in Great Britain today, are far, far more constricted than American. There's a lot less free speech. And because if the Europeans are able to enforce those standards on Meta, Meta tends to like one standard, one rule for the entire platform. So you could end up with the United States citizens on Meta having essentially European rules. So you've got this complicated thing where, yes, the US Government is a threat to Meta and to the free speech of Meta, which it has, but you do have the Supreme Court there to help. But the other alternative is not just freedom. The other alternative is the European Union. So when Zuckerberg says, we want to fight the European Union and we want Trump to help us, there's this odd thing where government could be. If he could figure out how to balance the European Union and the Trump administration against one another, the company itself might gain some freedom of action. That would loosen things up here. I mean, in the long run, everyone's gonna have to figure out we can't win by getting the social media companies to get rid of our, you know, opponents. We've gotta come up with some workable rules that no one loves but everyone can live with, and we're sort of fighting toward those. And, you know, at the First Amendment level, for a hundred years, there was no. Freedom of speech is very attenuated. From the 20s to the 60s, it was better, but still nothing like we have today. It takes a while to work these things out. And I think this is just another step, I hope, in working things out where everyone can live with it without loving the situation.
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Stephen Overlea
Well, John, really appreciate you being here on Politico Tech.
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John Samples
Okay, thank you. It's been great.
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Stephen Overlea
That's all for today's Politico Tech. If you enjoy Politico Tech, be sure to subscribe. And for more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Our managing producer is Annie Reiss. Our producer is Afra Abdullah. I'm Stephen Overlea. See you back here tomorrow.