John Oliver took aim at Mark Zuckerberg and the world of content moderation in this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight.
The host of the HBO series looked at “just how much the tech industry seemed to swing toward Trump” since the election last year.
He played footage of the Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, explaining the new rules of Facebook which would be less strict on factchecking. Oliver joked that he looked like “Eddie Redmayne was cast to play Ice Cube” and while Zuckerberg stressed the importance of returning the site to its roots and emulating real-world conversations, he was wearing a $900,00 watch, a sign of how “out of touch” he is.
Oliver said it was “a pretty notable shift” given how Zuckerberg had previously apologised to Congress about how the site had allowed lies to spread.
He went back and talked about section 230, which was created at the start of the internet and meant that sites were shielded from liability for what its users post as they “couldn’t possibly vet” all of the content unless it was deemed to be illegal.
He said “mostly it allows them to moderate without fear” and that moderation is “absolutely key to making the internet bearable”.
He added: “If you want people to use your site and crucially have companies want to pay to advertise on it you’re going to have to make choices about what to remove and how you make those choices is always going to be contentious.”
The “initial optimism” expressed by those involved with Facebook that users could be trusted to behave didn’t last and moderation became “a grim job” with boundaries difficult to define.
Oliver said that for Zuckerberg “a simple dream of ranking his classmates by fuckability” soon became a “company struggling to stop people from accusing random pizzerias of human trafficking”.
He soon was under “heavy fire for allowing fake news and hate speech to proliferate” with those on the right claiming “political persecution” for content being removed which was “obviously all bullshit”.
“Conservatives have been crying censorship for years but the evidence for that is very weak,” he said while adding that they were “more likely to spread disinformation according to numerous empirical studies”.
Zuckerberg spoke on the Joe Rogan podcast about how the spread of Covid disinformation meant there was pressure to remove anti-vaxx stories after Biden claimed this was “killing people”.
Yet despite his claims that he was being forced to remove such stories after being cursed and screamed at by government agencies, nothing that actually happened “fit Zuckerberg’s narrative” and “allegations like these have been adjudicated in court”.
He felt like he was being forced to comply with Democratic rule yet his recent behaviour has shown something different.
“Trump threatened Mark Zuckerberg with life in prison then Mark Zuckerberg turned around, gave him money, hired one of his buddies and changed the direction his company was going,” he said. “It doesn’t take a genius to draw a conclusion there.”
He spoke about the “$25m bullshit lawsuit” that Trump won against him.
“Trump is doing exactly what Zuckerberg accused the Biden adminstration of: leveraging the power of his office to pressure social media companies to bend to his will.”
Oliver said that with the new lack of restrictions it “sure seems set to become an absolute sewer of hatred and misinformation”, which he argued it already was but, he said: “We’re about to see what happens when they really stop trying”.
There was recently a 5,000% increase in searches on how to delete accounts and users who remain should take things with “even more of a grain of salt than you did before”.
But Oliver reminded viewers that advertising makes up 98% of revenue still and that this involved companies trying to microtarget you. But “you can change your settings” to affect profits, details of which he said were on www.johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com.
