On this month’s bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy are talking political education in this new era of traditional and social media bowing to Trump and the MAGA movement. We get into:

- The beliefs about free speech behind the changes at Meta that Mark Zuckerberg recently announced

- How our understanding of healthy discourse differs from those beliefs

- And tips for staying politically educated in this new environment

Credits

- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.

- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.

- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.

- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy.

- Editing by Sy.

- Production by Sy and our incredible subscribers

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Sy Hoekstra: The moderation isn't really a problem, it's sort of the greed behind the companies. Like, the people who have realized, “Oh, I can make a ton of money by making people super angry [laughs]. And I don't care what that does to our public discourse, because it makes me money.” That's the real problem to me. It's not actually the fact that somebody has said, “I will not let people say anti-Semitic things on my platform. “

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Hello, hello, everybody. This is Sy. Jonathan and I are still recording these monthly bonus episodes on Substack live. Thank you if you were able to join us for the live recording this time around. I'm just here to tell you that the recording cut off the very, very beginning of what I said when we started. So if I just dropped you in, it wouldn't make any sense. What I'm gonna do is seamlessly transition us from this to the live recording. Now ready? Here we go. Welcome to this bonus episode of Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. [transition to live recording] I'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Welcome again to this bonus episode recorded live on Substack. Thank you to everyone who is joining and watching right now and watching later, and again, thanks for being a subscriber to this podcast. We appreciate you.

Sy Hoekstra: We are going to be talking today, as the headline says, about how to be politically educated, how to keep yourself politically educated in this new era of Trump. And not just Trump, but also both legacy and social media platforms, kind of bowing the knee to him and doing his bidding [laughs]. Political education has always been central to what we talk about at KTF Press, and our reasons for doing it and what we’re trying to accomplish haven't changed, but the way that you go about doing it is actually starting to change in significant ways. So we thought we would take some time to talk about kind of the reasons behind the changes that are happening in the media and how that means we need to be paying attention going forward in order to remain people who are informed and who can be helpful and who can serve the kingdom of God in our politics.

So we're kind of merging the whole show together. Normally, we have our conversation and then we do separately the Which Tab Is Still Open, which is where we have a segment where we talk about diving deeper into one of the things from our newsletter, one of the highlights that one of us brought out from the news in our newsletter. When we were talking about this conversation, I was like, “I wanna talk about the Meta stuff and Mark Zuckerberg and those announcements that he made.” And as we had the conversation, we sort of realized that's actually the whole episode [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: We're doing a whole episode of Which Tab Is Still Open. I will explain those of you who don't know, give a brief summary of what it is that Mark Zuckerberg said exactly last week, and then we will get into the meat of the conversation. And then we'll be talking about how to find trustworthy sources and how to better understand the political and news climate that we are in in this new Trump era. So this is gonna be a really good conversation. I'm sure you’ll all enjoy it. Jonathan, though, before we get started, it's your turn to talk [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well, if you're listening to this live, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting this work so we can do more of it. If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to this video, audio and all of our live and bonus episodes from like [laughs] the last four years. You also get access to archives of everything that we've done, our Zoom calls as well. So please, please, do become a paid subscriber. You'll also get the ability to comment and interact with us more, and you'll be supporting everything that we're doing as we push for just political discipleship and education and leave behind the idols of the American church. Welcome to all y'all who just signed on.

For everybody, if you do like Shake the Dust, definitely go to Apple, Spotify, give a great review. That helps people discover the show and lets us know that y'all appreciate what we're doing, and we are so excited to jump into this conversation today. Go for it, Sy.

Sy Hoekstra: All right, let me get us caught up. And for the people who are live, feel free to comment or question in the chat at any point, and Jonathan will be monitoring that. We will incorporate that into our discussion. And join us live, by the way, if you wanna have that opportunity, if you're listening later. So like I said, what I'm gonna do is explain just the brief bullet points of everything that Mark Zuckerberg said in his reel last week [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And all of the changes that are happening at Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram and Threads.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And then we will get into the conversation about it after I go into that. Like I said, Which Tab Is Still Open right at the top of the show. So here are the announcements that he made, and they're all about content moderation and filtering content and everything on Facebook and Instagram and Threads. So the first thing, he has six announcements. I'll go through them really quickly. One is they are ending their fact checking program [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: They are completely getting rid of all of their mostly third party fact checkers and replacing them with community notes like they have on Twitter, meaning users will be doing the fact checking and trying to post notes to correct disinformation on Facebook, instead of having professional fact checkers doing that. He will be limiting moderation on certain subjects. He specifically mentioned immigration and gender. People who have subsequently reported about the policy changes have said there are also things about race and some other subjects that will not be moderated. And this is like basically saying that censorship on those subjects is out of touch with mainstream discourse now.

All of this he made pretty clear, was revolving around Trump's election. They're gonna be focusing their content filters, like their automatic, not the actual people doing the fact checking or the humans doing the moderation, but the robo content filters [laughs] on illegal content and high severity violations, as he described them. So that's stuff like drugs and terrorism and child exploitation, that sort of thing. And then anything that is not on those subjects, in order for the filters to act in any way, people will have to affirmatively report them. The filters won't act preemptively. They're gonna bring back what they call civic content, which is like their political content.

They had been, as a lot of you probably know, sort of hiding it. You had to go into your settings and say that you specifically wanted to see it to get it in your feed. So they're taking away that filter, that'll be back in your feed. And then the [laughs], there's two more. One is the safety and content moderation teams. They are moving to Texas, where they're, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “where there will be less co...