At this time, Meta’s Head of Public Policy was Joel Kaplan, a man whose previous work involved working as George W. Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, as well as handling public policy and affairs for Energy Future Holdings, which involved three private equity firms buying Texas power company TXU for $45 billion and immediately steering it into bankruptcy due to the $38.7 billion in debt Energy Future Holdings was forced to take on as a means of acquiring TXU.

Jeff Horwitz reports in his book Broken Code that Kaplan personally intervened when Facebook’s health team attempted to remove COVID conspiracy movie Plandemic from its recommendation engine, and Facebook only did so once Roose reported that it was the most-engaged link in a 24 hour period.

Naturally, Meta’s choice wasn’t to “fix things” or “improve” or “take responsibility.” By the end of 2021, Meta had disbanded the team that ran CrowdTangle, and in early 2022, the company had stopped registering new users. In early 2024 — months before the 2024 elections — CrowdTangle was officially shut down, though Facebook Top 10 had stopped working in the middle of 2023.

Meta hasn’t “made a right-wing turn.”  It’s been an active arm of the right wing media for nearly a decade

I also did not like something Newton said at the end of a (paywalled) blog about what he learned from the reaction to his piece about AI skeptics. Newton said, and I quote, that he was “taking detailed notes on all bloggers writing ’financial analyses’ suggesting that OpenAI will go bankrupt soon because it’s not profitable yet.”

I do not like bullies, and I do not like threats. Suggesting one is “taking detailed notes on bloggers” is an attempt to intimidate people that are seriously evaluating the fact that OpenAI burns $5 billion a year and has no path to profitability. I don’t know if this is about me, nor do I particularly care.

Musk has also made weird veiled threats to keeping lists. I bet Zuckerberg is just smart enough to not tell people he keeps a list of people he keeps tabs on and uses his immense wealth to crush.

I mean, we know Monsanto had a “fusion center” that fought tooth and nail to have any negative coverage of Monsanto destroyed, intimidated, or flooded with negative reviews and responses.

We have had executives from eBay mailing critics dead animals.

If I were Zitron I’d be worried about way more than just another journalist who is stuck up powerful people’s asses, but that’s the price of speaking truth to power.

Ed continues to bat 1000.

Social Media was a mistake anyways. Let the corporations burn, I don’t care what Meta does or will do, because I don’t use anything from them.

The corporations are getting their mathematics wrong, they want everything to sum to 1933 but they are out by 144.