This is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of La Voz News.
President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term on Jan. 20. Front row at the inauguration were Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerbeg, owners of X and Meta respectively. The pair have followed a pattern of aligning with the president and carving out protections for his extremist MAGA base on their social media platforms in a likely attempt to curry favor with the administration.
With sweeping changes coming to Facebook’s content moderation, the longstanding platform may be going the way of Twitter, now X, opening the doors for extremism and hate speech.
Meta founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that Facebook would be making significant alterations to their policies covering misinformation and hate speech on Jan. 7.
In the announcement, Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook would be ending third-party fact checking, moving instead to a community notes-driven system similar to that of X. Facebook also announced they would be easing restrictions on speech around gender and sexual identity.
“We’re gonna simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender,” Zuckerberg said. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.”
While posed under the guise of free speech and free expression, in effect this means Facebook taking a hands off approach when it comes to discrimination, bigotry and misinformation hosted on the platform.
This opens the floodgates to misinformation and potential hate speech on Facebook and continues a dangerous trend of bending to the values of Trump and his supporters, making the website’s users less safe.
Opinions that individuals should have freedom of gender expression, and calls for the all-out extermination of trans people would now be treated equally so long as there was no specific threat of violence targeted toward an individual.
This all bears an eerie similarity to moves made by X owner Elon Musk, who not only met with then-president-elect Trump, but made numerous appearances on the campaign trail.
X’s hands-off moderation style has allowed the platform to become a nexus for hate speech, misinformation and white nationalist sentiment, some of which have been echoed by Musk himself, even giving an alleged Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration.
As billionaire social media owners continue to bow at the altar of Trump and MAGA, they are actively making online spaces more hostile, if not outright dangerous to members of protected groups such as the LGBTQ community, racial and ethnic minorities and other historically marginalized communities.
X’s moves, from unbanning the founder of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website and newspaper, a doubling in antisemitism on the platform between 2022-23 while banning the term “cis” as a slur, makes it clear what kind of speech Musk wants more of on his website.
Additionally, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League, X has become a haven for any and all conspiracies and forms of misinformation, ranging from those as benign as poorly informed claims the moon landing was faked to all-out Holocaust denial, which is itself another significant tenet of neo-Nazism and white supremacy.
The content moderation moves being made by Facebook mirror those made by Musk on X, including many of the same dog whistles Musk did during the lead-up to these changes at X, such as bold claims about more speech and condemning what he calls a bias of the legacy media against Trump.
This brings us face-to-face with the paradox of tolerance; that is, that any sufficiently open and tolerant society should have intolerance solely for the intolerant and hateful. When we see neo-Nazis we shouldn’t just smile and wave, or handle the topic with kid gloves, it should be clear that Nazism is unwelcome in a free and open society.
White nationalism remains the most violent and deadliest U.S. terrorism threat, it needs to be treated as such. The moves Musk has made on X have created an online enclave for this ideology in broad daylight, Facebook must change course before it becomes something similar.
With just over 194 million active users on Facebook in the U.S. alone, these changes are set to have a catastrophic effect on national public discourse.
The increase in hate speech and disinformation coupled with an increase in pushing political content on users’ home feeds risks creating a mass pipeline for white nationalist radicalization and bolstering domestic terrorism, which flourished under the previous Trump administration.
The path forward needs to be twofold. We, as social media users, need to call for greater oversight to reduce hateful content targeting historically marginalized groups. We also need to push social media platforms to take a more active role in dealing with white nationalism on their platforms.
