There's a very interesting connection between Mark Zuckerberg's right-wing turn and the guy who might be the most powerful person in American media. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, so...
A thread.
First of all, let's be clear. Mark Zuckerberg's didn't just announce changes to Meta's content moderation policy. He didn't even announce that Meta's content policy will change.
He announced that his company is willing to help kill people.
How?
First of all, replacing fact-checking with community notes doesn't just mean misinformation and hate will spread, it means people will die because of it.
For instance , Facebook removed MILLIONS of posts containing COVID misinformation.
At one point, there was MORE COVID misinformation than CORRECT information from hospitals, govt agencies & doctors.
Imagine how many kids would have died if, instead of removing posts, there was just a note that said:
"COVID slumber parties are probably not a good idea."
Do y'all remember WHY Kyle Rittenhouse grabbed his AR-15 & headed to Kenosha?
Facebook
FB ADMITS they should've removed the post earlier bc it violated their rules, but imagine how many OTHER deaths they caught
Now imagine what'll happen with "less liberal" content moderators
FB also removed the Unite the Right rally event page the day before Nazis convened in Charlottesville. They don't deserve props, but it could've been worse if content moderators can just say:
Speaking of both sides, remember when researchers, journalists and even Congress UNDER TRUMP found out that 95% of the George Floyd protests were peaceful and right-wing groups caused MOST of the violence?
Whatever happened to the Boogaloo Boys anyway?
They came out of nowhere, fucked shit up during the summer of 2020, & just disappeared.
And they would've gotten away with it, if it wasn't for those damn liberal content moderators
You might be too young to remember when you could buy guns on FB. The leftists stopped it in 2014 But imagine how many mass shootings we averted
I'm old enough to remember the story that made the whole content moderation debate go viral.
What you know about "Pizzagate?"
The story about Democrats running a child sex trafficking ring from a DC pizza shop w/ an email server in Hillary Clinton's basement started on Reddit. But it went crazy when people started posting the pizzeria customer's IG pics on FB
THen a "hero" showed up with a machine gun
Russia saw the disinformation and was like: Damn! That's a good idea.
Never forget that Russia targeted "no single group more than African Americans." 40% of the disinformation was on FB & 2 out of every three posts was aimed at Black people.
I'm sure a few digital post-its can stop a coordinated campaign by one of the biggest intelligence networks on the planet that's using racism to undermine democracy.
We won't talk about how FB contributed to ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka, Myanmar & other places where content moderation isn't as robust as when a Black person is suspended for even mentioning the esteemed Mr. Wyatt P. Pull
Or people at least thought he wasn't a right-wing wingnut.
Then again, we thought the same thing about Mark Zuckerburg and Jeff Bezos. No one thought they were libs but, at worst, they were just ruthless capitalists.
What happened?
I have a theory.
There's a common thread between all these oligarchs and their right-wing pivot. To be fair, I didn't notice this until I watched the Zuckerberg announcement for myself.
The Venn Diagram also includes Elon's apartheid bro Peter Theil, the campaign against CRT...
The attack on DEI, the trans sports debate that doesn't exist, anti-vaxxers and all the stuff that pisses of "straight white guys" who Donald Trump will save
And it all started with the most powerful force in American media.
Joe Rogan
Unlike a lot of people, I won't pretend that I never liked Joe Rogan or say he isn't funny. I once did a Pew Research panel on podcast listenership & they don't even count Rogan because is audience is too huge. You can't fathom how big his audience is.
If JRE was on TV, it would rank as the most-watched series on TV besides Sunday Night Football and the Olympics. That's why Spotify gave him a $200 mill
I've paid to see him do comedy & listened to hundreds of episodes, and I thought it was interesting.
Notice I said "was"
He was a curious and funny guy who was interested in a lot of things. And it's funny to hear someone who's funny explore different topics with the premise of "I don't know shit, but I'm interested in everything."
Then, it started changing.
My mother once said: "If there's such a thing as 'average intelligence,' at least half the people are below average."
And because his audience was so big, male and largely white, millions of below-average white guys believed Joe Rogan wasn't just curious...
He was smart.
Even worse, he believed it.
Imit it in a million years, but then again, no one thinks they're dumb.
I'll even tell you when I think it started:
When he moved from California to Texas because they had more "freedoms"
Whenever a white man adds an s to "freedom," he's gone.
But he didn't just move there. He opened a comedy club. And when the pandemic hit, and people criticized him for not shutting down, he slowly started drifting rightward. He invited on anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists like RFK and others.
Remember, 12 years ago, Joe Rogan was the one who started "warning" people about the danger of Trans women in sports. (Since then, there's been 5 examples. There's literally more laws against trans women in k-12 sports than trans women in K-12 sports)
I’m sure you think I’m gonna mention Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black fur trader who is known as the first non-indigenous resident of Chicago.
But du Sable was not enslaved when he moved to the mouth of the Chicago river in 1790.
So who TF was buying furs?
Well, remember all that was French territory. In 1719 French entrepreneur Philippe François Renault hopped in a boat in the South of France, stopped in Haiti to purchase 200-500 humans beings & headed to “Upper Louisiana”
By 1760, 900 ppl were enslaved in “Illinois Country”
By now, it has become apparent that this man is much dumber than people initially thought, but here is why this specific act of ignorance is so common.
"Slavery was standard practice throughout earth..."
Let's start here.
While MOST societies (not all) had forms of involuntary subjugation, people who don't know things use their ignorance and privilege to flatten the idea of slavery.
I always found it funny that ppl who say "slavery existed in every society," also LOVE to differentiate between indentured servants and enslaved people.
Whitewashing the uncomfortable parts of the past doesn't just affect Black stories. For example, you can't fully appreciate how a peanut farmer from Plains, GA became a beloved president unless you know TRUE Black History.
The unwhitewashed history of Jimmy Carter:
A thread.
Jimmy Carter was a simple peanut farmer who grew up in Plains, GA when the deep South was defined by racism. His family taught him not to see color. Instead of asking for handouts, they focused on God, education and...
OK, none of that happened.
First of all, to understand where Jimmy Carter comes from, you have to go back a few generations. Because you probably already know a few of his cousins.
In fact, he might not even be the most famous person in his family. But I'll let you decide.
Brett Favre is a descendant of Simon Favre, a famous“interpreter” who could speak multiple native languages.
Simon entered the family business at a young age and owned dozens of slaves and 100s of acres
But that wasn’t the family business.
The Favres stole land
The scam worked like this:
The Favres would move near a native tribe, earn their trust and convince native Americans that giving up their land & assimilating was in their best interest.
In exchange, they could keep some of the stolen land
For five years, I have been covering what is unquestionably the biggest criminal justice scandal in American history.
Today it ended when the most corrupt cop in history took his life.
But it's not over.
A thread.
For 5 decades, police officer Roger Golubski sexually assaulted Black women and forced to give false testimony that he used to send Black men to prison while he ran a sex trafficking and drug cartel in Kansas City Kansas