After the short lull in the US presidential campaign (it never really stops, but happens with varying intensity), campaigning is already starting to pick up speed ahead of the 2024 election, and Facebook looks like it wants to preemptively convince the powers-that-be that it is playing ball, censorship-wise.
(They call it, “fighting misinformation.”)
Former UK politician turned Big Tech exec, Meta (Facebook) Global Affairs President Nick Clegg, last week attended one of those meetings between the White House and Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. The conversation was reportedly about artificial intelligence and how scary that is in terms of “undermining elections” – but Clegg’s statements made afterwards suggest he was eager to address some broader issues here.
Clegg’s overall assurance, or promise, is that Facebook and others owned by Meta are now “getting better on fighting misinformation.”
How much “better” can they get, must be wondering the multitudes of users who got silenced, deplatformed, and deranked over the years.
In numbers, revealed by Clegg, Meta’s struggle against what it decides (or is made to decide) is “nefarious content” is an effort that has received $16 billion in funding these last years, and has “tens of thousands” of people committed to the task, 24/7.
Looking ahead to – or dreading – how Meta will be painted this time by the unhappy press, should things go badly for the current administration come November 2024 – Clegg was telling Yahoo Finance, “I do think we are getting better. We have constant practice in doing this.”
This censorship athlete that keeps practicing how to do it, also explained that artificial intelligence is used to “make sure that bad content, and nefarious content, whether it’s disinformation, whether it’s foreign attempts to interfere in elections, whether it’s hate speech and so on, those systems will tackle content regardless of where it’s created, whether it’s created by a human being or by a machine.”
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