Meta is a Headache for Human Rights Defenders

The announcement by Mark Zuckerberg earlier in the week that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was dismantling its moderation teams, generated an upheaval in the news media. On Friday Meta announced that would end its diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI), programs. A further blow to bringing greater parity in representation on the ranks of its companies. The numbers of hires at Facebook/Meta are still shockingly low, “in 2022…only 37.1 percent of Meta's workforce were women, 4.9 percent were Black, and 6.7 percent were Hispanic.”

Meta is a global company. The majority of its users are in the Global South and are from diverse ethnic groups. How well it can serve them if its upper-management ranks and software engineers only include white-privilege boys that know zero history and are indoctrinated by white supremacists that are waging war on the poor?

Zuckerberg seeks to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration that has waged a war on equality and diversity, an administration composed mostly of white middle-aged men showing high levels of illiteracy in relation to questions of racial and social justice.

The Meta CEO would do well to remember that the opportunities he had growing-up and his white-Jewish-male-privilege stems from human rights policies that allowed Jews to come to America during the Holocaust, attend university (for example, Columbia University would not allow Jews to attend its medical school in the early to mid-20th Century). While much has changed, and Columbia has a vibrant Jewish student body, these university policies have changed thanks to inclusion and diversity advocates.

See Columbia Spectator:

“According to McCaughey, while half of the Columbia College applicants in total were accepted, only one in six Jewish applicants were admitted during the early 20th century. McCaughey tells me that though there was no specific quota, Jewish students, when interviewed, were advised to look toward NYU or CCNY, schools with larger public school graduates—which included many Jewish students—at the time.”

Zuckerberg is a drop-out of Harvard, perhaps he should have graduated and taken some history classes, as he is not aware of why and how human rights legislation protected and still protect him and his family.

As Platformer’s Casey Newton reports:

“Meta started its DEI efforts in the 2010s amid growing scrutiny of the lack of women and minorities in its workforce, and in Silicon Valley workforces in general. Critics pointed out that "merit-based" approaches were often subjective and influenced by biases. DEI efforts were intended to help reverse systemic inequality by identifying candidates from less privileged backgrounds, who may have faced barriers to getting jobs at Meta that others didn't.

For a time, those ideas gained traction within Meta, which sought to build a workforce that at least somewhat reflected the billions of people the company serves. The company doubled the number of women, Black, and Hispanic employees in its US workforce, but true equity proved to be elusive. In 2022, at perhaps the height of the company's DEI initiatives, only 37.1 percent of Meta's workforce were women, 4.9 percent were Black, and 6.7 percent were Hispanic.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of 2020 racial justice protests, some Republicans began to crusade against DEI, "critical race theory," and affirmative action. Florida, Texas and other states have passed laws banning DEI initiatives in an effort to preserve the existing race and gender hierarchies. A handful of Silicon Valley companies joined in, led by Coinbase, which banned employees from discussing politics near the height of the 2020 George Floyd protests.” Read full story on Platformer, Casey Newton

I highly recommend listening to New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast with Casey Newton’s and Kevin Rose where they dissect the announcement by Zuckerberg.

Meta goes MAGA Mode. Link to podcast here.

Or watch on YouTube.

Liar, Liar Pants on Fire

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lied about “censorship” in the EU.

See POLITICO Europe link.

BRUSSELS — Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg was not telling the truth when he said the European Union was institutionalizing censorship, the bloc’s top tech official said.

“We know that it’s not true,” European Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunen told POLITICO. “In Europe freedom of speech is one of our fundamental values and it’s also respected and protected [in] our Digital Services Act. So it’s very misleading also to say that.”

See Guardian article on impact on mental health of fact-checkers

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD

Lawsuit brought by former moderators against parent company Meta

Facebook Algorithmic Manipulation of Feeds

So, why does the UN continues to spend huge amounts of its global communications budget on these platforms? Between paid social, which nobody at the UN seems to know how much is spent, and the salaries of several P-2 and above staff (P irefers to the professional rank of UN staff with salaries starting at $150K USD a year and above) personnel dedicated to producing free content to these platforms, a budget well in the millions of dollars annually.

A social media team of ten people with an average salaries of $250K USD a year will cost the organisation $2.5 million USD, plus the generous benefits that pay for staff members’ children’s schooling in private schools.

Melissa Fleming, an American national who leads the UN Department of Global Communications in New York, is the one pushing for producing content for American social media companies.

She even made a campaign that showed how little the UN knows about how social media platforms push content and the algorithms’ authoritarianism. The campaign asked people to stop before sharing content, and verifying its trustworthiness.

That is preposterous, the onus should not be on the platform user. Besides it is the social media overlords that are pushing this “algorithmically designed content” to fuel engagement and violence.

It is like as if she does not know how AI-powered algorithms work.

There are several lawsuits now to make Facebook algorithm design accountable.

“Lawsuits against Meta allege that the algorithm, design, and features of Facebook and other social media platforms are to blame for the increase in mental health disorders among teens and adolescents. Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of repeatedly misleading the public about the dangers associated with the use of the platform and the algorithms it uses to enhance personalization and increase engagement among users.”

Shouldn’t the UN be using tax-payers money to curb violence online by withdrawing from these platforms?

Even if the content is distributed organically, there is a cost to the organization in staff-hours spent producing propaganda for social media, into what basically amounts to providing free content to Facebook and Twitter, that these platforms in turn monetize by selling ads to support their hate speech dissemination policies.

A conversation that must be amplified in 2025. This strategy of pouring millions on social media “content” production by the UN communications’ teams in detriment of supporting the news media, including the UN correspondents based in Geneva, should be reviewed by the UN country-members.

The general public counts on the news media to be informed and have a trustworthy critical analysis of the work of the UN.

Not public relations fluff.

The infantilization of the public by little games and other juvenile nuisances that guide the aesthetics of these “social media content campaigns” is quite repugnant.

The role of the UN public information divisions is to inform and entertain, but not by making idiotic graphics, dumbing down information, that insult the intelligence of readers. Besides the millions of clicks that the UN press officers are so proud to show need to be scrutinized, as there are millions of bots and trolls in these “engagement” reports, making the ROI non-existent. Just look at the UN agencies timelines and “audiences” replies to posts. Only bots and trolls, no real community engagement.

The UN should perha...