Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Zuckerberg is an information oligarch’

Facebook and it’s sister platform Instagram’s have decided to no longer be policed in the US by fact-checkers.

Their parent company Meta said the social media sites will be moderated by user-generated community notes like Elon Musk’s platform, X.

Former Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote the best-seller ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, a sociological analysis of the digital era.

Matt Frei: How significant are these changes to Facebook announced by Mark Zuckerberg today?

Shoshana Zuboff: On the one hand, content moderation has not been effective. Content moderation has been this invention that took the place of having communication platforms that actually adhered to legitimate standards of truthfulness, of the actual integrity of information. And because we started off the 21st century without making those rules and laws, establishing those rights, and so we ended up in a place where it was chaos. Content moderation was their downstream answer to that chaos. And we’ve known for a long time that content moderation not only doesn’t work, but when you consider the volume of corrupt information that’s flowing through these platforms, there’s no way that it can work. And in fact, I’m sure you covered it, there was a leaked Facebook document in 2021 from its own privacy engineers, terrified of impending regulations and changing laws and changing public expectations. They simply weren’t going to be able to meet because they understood content moderation can’t possibly work. The fact that content moderation didn’t work doesn’t mean that other things could not have worked.

Matt Frei: Moving away from content moderation, let me ask you this. Zuckerberg, four years ago to the day, bumped Trump off his platform because of 6 January. Now he’s given $1 million to his inauguration. He’s gone to pay reverence at Mar a Lago, and he’s now got rid of the fact checkers. Why is Zuckerberg doing all this?

Shoshana Zuboff: Zuckerberg is the ruler, he’s what I call an information oligarch. He owns this massive information real estate in the middle of our new civilisation, which is an information civilisation. Everything depends on the integrity of information. He owns one of the biggest pieces of real estate in this whole space. There’s a problem, because right from the start, the things that his business depends on to make money should have been characterised as crimes. They steal our data, they invade our experience, that’s surveillance, and then they change our experience into data. They steal that data in the sense that they immediately turn around and call it their own. They say these are corporate assets and they use those corporate assets to make money.