Is it too much to ask for cops to be better? When other government employees get the address wrong, it may mean mail delivery delays or incorrect property tax assessments. But when cops get it wrong, people end up dead.
If officers are unfamiliar with the area they’ll be serving warrants in, it would make sense to engage in a little surveillance ahead of time to ensure the deadly mistakes like these aren’t made. But they never do because the government always believes the innocent people caught off guard by truly unexpected invasions of their personal space are in the wrong for reacting in ways cops somehow still don’t expect them to react.
And yet, for the most part, officers and their employers are given a free pass for killing innocent people, so long as officers believed the person they gunned down was actually the criminal suspect they were seeking to apprehend.
Police in Kentucky recently shot a man to death in his home while they executed a search warrant that appears to have been intended for a different address.
Doug Harless, 63, lived in London, a southern Kentucky town of about 8,000 residents, and was killed by police officers at his home at 511 Vanzant Road on the night of 23 December. However, audio from local Laurel county emergency dispatchers – and obtained by Kentucky news stations – shows that the search warrant was intended for 489 Vanzant Road, as was repeated multiple times on a recording of the audio.
The owner of 489 Vanzant Road told news station WKYT that no one had lived at that address for months.
While the layout of the neighborhood is less than intuitive (the address 511 Vanzant doesn’t show up on Google Maps), that should have told officers to be especially careful when determining which residence housed the person they were seeking.
While 511 Vanzant doesn’t appear on the map, 489 Vanzant does. Whether or not Google Maps (or a competing product) was used to determine the approximate location of the residence is, ultimately, a non-factor here. As WKYT’s reporting shows, the addresses of both homes were clearly marked on the houses’ exteriors:
While officers repeated no less than six times they needed assistance at 489 Vanzant, the actual address (511) was staring them in the face the whole time. The only recording released of this incident comes from a nearby home’s security cameras. The camera also captured audio of the incident, which began at nearly midnight, presumably for the sole purpose of making things more dangerous for everyone involved. (Standard practice on arrest warrants is to serve them during daylight hours when most people are likely to be home. Additional justification is needed to serve warrants late at night or very early in the morning.)
The recording shows officers swarming the house, followed by a lot of cops yelling stuff… immediately followed by five police gunshots.
Immediately following this killing, the London Police released this statement, which is very much exemplary of cop-speak: the exonerative “view from nowhere” where things happened to non-cops, but not because any cop was directly responsible for the end result of these apparently inadvertent actions.
On December 23, 2024, Officers from the London Police Department were following up with an investigation which started in the city limits of London. This investigation led officers to attempt to execute a search warrant at a residence on Vanzant Road in Laurel County. While doing so, the occupant of the residence produced a firearm and pointed it at officers. The officer then responded with force, which resulted in the death of the occupant.
It’s better than saying “weapons were discharged” without specifying whose weapons and who fired them, but not by much. But “responded with force” is a cowardly way to say officers shot at the man and “resulted in death” is a very dainty way to say “officers killed the man.”
With the man dead and the only released recording showing only the outside of the (wrong) home being invaded, it’s the officers’ word against the dead man’s. And, tragically, he’s in no position to counter this narrative.
The man the cops killed was Douglas Harless, a 63-year-old resident of Lily, Kentucky. The police couldn’t even be bothered to name the person they’d killed in their press release, much less provide reporters with any information about the person they were actually going after, who obviously didn’t live at the house officers raided despite it clearly and obviously being the wrong address.
And, given the statement of the property owner in reference to 489 Vanzant (“no one [has] lived at that address for months”), there’s good reason to believe officers were relying on outdated information to locate and apprehend the suspect they were actually looking for. Whatever the case may be (and new facts will definitely be slow to arrive if this thing was botched as badly as it appears to be), this was sloppy work. But sloppy means wrist slaps for cops and the loss of life for people whose only “mistake” was being in their own homes when officers came knocking.
Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel, is like many dodgy data brokers. The company gleans vast troves of sensitive U.S. behavior and location cellphone data, then generally sells access to that data to a long line of folks. Including the U.S. government, which has increasingly turned to buying data broker data as a quick and easy end around for having to get a warrant.
Last month the FTC sued Gravy Analytics saying it routinely collects sensitive phone location and behavior data without getting the consent of consumers. This month, hackers claim to have compromised the giant surveillance company, gaining access to 17 terabytes of data, including a bunch of sensitive location data detailing the very specific movement patterns of U.S. consumers.
As the fine folks at 404 Media note, this is yet another inflection point for a super dodgy and barely regulated commercial surveillance industry at the center of scandal after scandal:
The news is a crystalizing moment for the location data industry. For years, companies have harvested location information from smartphones, either through ordinary apps or the advertising ecosystem, and then built products based on that data or sold it to others. In many cases, those customers include the U.S. government, with arms of the military, DHS, the IRS, and FBI using it for various purposes. But collecting that data presents an attractive target to hackers.
“A location data broker like Gravy Analytics getting hacked is the nightmare scenario all privacy advocates have feared and warned about. The potential harms for individuals is haunting, and if all the bulk location data of Americans ends up being sold on underground markets, this will create countless deanonymization risks and tracking concerns for high risk individuals and organizations,” Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, and who has followed the location data industry closely, told 404 Media. “This may be the first major breach of a bulk location data provider, but it won’t be the last.”
We’ve long noted how the data broker space is an unregulated mess, routinely over-collecting data, selling access to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together (including foreign intelligence or criminals), and failing to generally secure it. Wired last month had a piece detailing how it was trivial to purchase U.S. troop and intelligence officer movement data as they visited sensitive U.S. locations in Germany.
Now the one agency that actually did anything about the problem (the FTC) is about to be absolutely defanged under Trump because a handful of billionaires thought Lina Khan was being personally mean to them. Ain’t democracy grand.
The warning signs are absolutely blaring, and the entire location data sector is absolutely begging for a scandal that makes all previous scandals look like a lovely summer picnic. At which point, all of the policymakers who repeatedly refused to take consumer privacy seriously will stand around with their hands on hips in a real life version of the Spiderman meme, wondering how exactly we got here.
As Michael McGrady pointed out in his recent guest post for Techdirt, nearly 41 percent of Americans subject to age verification laws targeting porn and, of course, porn consumers. An emboldened pseudo-theocratic wing of the Republican party is taking everything old and unconstitutional and making it new again, presumably in hopes of sliding it past courts now staffed with Trump’s personal picks.
Fortunately, that percentage has dipped a bit in recent days. For how long remains to be seen, but the Free Speech Coalition (which is also suing the state of Florida over similar legislation) has secured an injunction blocking Tennessee’s age verification law.
The federal court decision [PDF] is a thoroughly enjoyable read, not just for its unabashed support for First Amendment rights, but also its extremely choice selection of citations, asides, and direct quotes from the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit.
The first paragraph is an absolute banger:
The First Amendment is not shy in its protective sweep. It sits at the top of our Bill of Rights as the “star in our constitutional constellation” because its light reaches orthodox and unorthodox expression alike. 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570, 584–85 (2023) (quoting West Virginia Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943)). To be sure, freedom of speech is not absolute. But the door preventing the state from intruding into this area “must be kept tightly closed and opened only the slightest crack necessary” to promote state interests. Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 563 (1969) (quoting Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 488 (1957)). Based on the record at this stage, it appears that Tennessee has wedged its foot in the door farther than the Constitution will likely tolerate.
The second paragraph is just as solid.
The Protect Tennessee Minors Act stands in a graveyard full of similar content-based restrictions at the state and federal level that lived—and died—before it. It imposes criminal and civil liability on any individual or commercial entity that publishes a website comprised of one-third content that is harmful to minors without first verifying that each visitor is at least eighteen years old. 2024 Tenn. Pub. Acts, ch. 1021, § 1 (to be codified at Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-17-912) (“PTMA”). Plaintiffs seek to enjoin the Attorney General from enforcing the PTMA before it becomes effective on January 1, 2025. Not only does the PTMA suffer from the same First Amendment fatalities as the state and federal laws that came before it, it also uniquely exacerbates those shortcomings in its overbreadth.
And the state’s “for the children” protestations are swept away before the third paragraph is even complete.
The legislature has a compelling interest in protecting children from harmful content, and that is uncontested. But in its attempt to protect children, the State will unavoidably suppress a large amount of speech that adults have a First Amendment right to give and receive. The legislature’s goal, however admirable, does not allow it to undermine an adult’s freedom of speech. Neither the legislature nor this Court can turn a blind eye to the Constitution.
Ah. That’s refreshing. Just a pure blast of constitutional righteousness, both in its original form and the way the hippies use the term. (Just to make it clear, my compliment of choice is “groovy,” which is similarly dated slang but at least was last uttered by a man with a chainsaw for an arm.)
The law is also ridiculous, on top of being unconstitutional. It mandates hourly verification of the user’s age. It requires websites that contain more than a third “harmful to minors” content (also vaguely defined) to collect and keep users’ personal information. However, the government graciously allows sites to use any “commercially reasonable method” to accomplish this intrusion, but does not provide any examples of what methods the state would find acceptable.
A footnote quoting one of the targeted websites makes it clear how impractical and unworkable this law is (here discussing the one-third content specification), even if it were constitutional.
“I do not know whether to evaluate the running time of the videos, the lines of code required to display the videos, the size of the files containing viewable content, or some other metric. For that matter, I do not know how to compare text to photos, or photos to videos.”
But it isn’t constitutional, so the court doesn’t need to address that specific complaint. However, it does take care to point it out because idiot legislators should be forced to confront the stupidity of their own mandates.
Speaking of being forced to confront, the court drops another bit of bench-slapping on the state, with another pithy citation.
In its crusade against internet pornography, Tennessee would “burn the house to roast the pig.” See Butler v. Michigan, 352 U.S. 380, 383 (1957). The First Amendment undoubtedly requires more precision than this kind of scorched-earth approach.
The state argued that this was no different that the recently challenged anti-drag show law that was recently (and narrowly) allowed to continue existing by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court. But this court says these aren’t remotely the same thing, even if both laws supposedly have the same goal: preventing kids from accessing adult content.
The AEA’s burden on adult speech is not comparable to the burden at issue here. There is a stark difference between requiring a brick-and-mortar location to spare one second to check government issued identification and requiring a website to pay a substantial amount of money to a third party to electronically verify a user’s age in a manner that is not easily circumvented. Moreover, while an individual attending an event in-person has already given up some modicum of privacy to do so, an adult inside his home using his computer to access a website has not.
Only legislators who believe it’s their god-given duty (and I mean that possibly literally) to foist their morality on everyone else would think this sort of thing would survive a constitutional review.
[T]he PTMA forces adult content creators to take costly measures to display constitutionally protected material, and it forces adult content consumers to give up their privacy to access material they have a constitutional right to access. The PTMA creates this barrier to constitutionally protected speech even if two-thirds of the content available on the website is not deemed harmful to minors.
And only legislators more interested in censoring than governing would allow this garbled language to land on the governor’s desk unaltered, replete with contradictions and a total lack of internal coherency.
Even if the Court narrowly construes subpart (i) to make it redundant, this would not save the PTMA. Subpart (ii) is separated from subpart (i) of subsection (A) by another disjunctive. PTMA § (b)(5)(A). This means that content that “principally consists of” an enumerated organ or act is subject to the regulation even if it is not “designed to appeal to or pander to the prurient interest” and even if it is not “sexually explicit and harmful or inappropriate for minors.”
Moreover, there is no requirement for these forbidden depictions to be patently offensive. In essence, “text” that “principally consists of” the words “pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple” does not even have to be “harmful” for minors to fall under the definition of “content harmful to minors.” The AG argues that this is irrelevant because the catch-all provision at the end requires that the text be measured by its value. But that catch-all provision would not solve this problem—just because content may not have serious value for minors does not make it harmful for them. Plaintiffs emphasize, and this Court agrees, that under the PTMA, the mere phrase “the human nipple” and the symbols “(o)(o)” would be subject to the age-verification requirement so long as they lack serious value for minors, even though they would not qualify as obscene.
The state gets completely owned here. It’s 36 pages of the court repeatedly telling legislators and the state AG that they are wrong, occasionally interrupted by a little procedural paperwork dealing with standing and standards of review. Every argument raised by the state is shut down. Every citation immediately countered.
For now, Tennessee’s age verification law is dead. But hope springs eternal in the hearts of these haters. It won’t stay dead forever. However, the First Amendment isn’t going anywhere either, and this particular needle doesn’t appear to have a hole that can be threaded, no matter how many times legislators head back for a rewrite.
A lot of people dunked on the amicus brief Donald Trump filed at the Supreme Court in the constitutional challenge of the law effectively banning TikTok. And there is plenty that is dunkable about it, especially in his tone of entitlement. Trump is no sincere defender of the First Amendment and its critical protections for speech rights. Nor is he really interested in any principled defense of TikTok. As it is, he filed in support of neither party because what he’s really playing for is time.
His concern here is that when it comes to TikTok he wants to get to decide what happens to it, and he’s mad that this law, if allowed to go into effect, won’t let him.
When it comes to what happens to TikTok he wants to be the hero, but the thing is, when it comes to what happens to TikTok right now he might be. Because, in an amicus brief that is sadly likely to be the high water mark of for any support he’s ever likely to give to the protective qualities of the First Amendment, by weighing in as he has he might have actually made a difference in putting the brakes on this unconstitutional ship that was sailing.
Before getting into how, the first thing to address is that it is ok if he turns out to be helpful here. It doesn’t redeem everything irredeemable about him and the governance he threatens. But while his sense of entitlement is a problem, as are the corrupt motivations that tend to animate him, the more immediate problem we are facing, right now, before he is even inaugurated, is whether the Constitution has suddenly changed in such a way that the government (including, eventually, his administration) is allowed to meddle with free expression.
Our single focus right now is to stop this law, and, in doing so, reinforce the Constitutional principles that prevent the government from acting against speech interests—as this law has and other state action in the future might seek to, including at his bidding. So if his personal petulance here can help us survive this Constitutional emergency, and ensure we are left with the tools to deal with him, then it is something to welcome.
And it’s possible that it might help make that difference, because in his brief his entitlement came wrapped in a few basic arguments, and what is interesting is how they, however inadvertently, and likely unintentionally, helped buttress some of the actually principled arguments we made in the Copia Institute’s brief we discussed yesterday.
One of his main arguments (headed as “Three Features of the Act, Considered in Combination, Raise Concerns of Possible Legislative Encroachment on Executive Authority Under Article II”) complains about how Congress was trampling on the prerogative of the Executive. In and of itself it’s not an impressive argument, especially given how this law only got passed with the blessing of the current Executive. On the other hand, the DC Circuit’s decision upholding the law credited the apparent unanimity between the previous Trump Administration and the current Biden Administration in their seemingly shared animus towards TikTok. If Trump is now saying that he and Biden are not in fact united in their view that TikTok needs to be banned then this information undermines the court’s reasoning.
Another argument he made later in his brief, that “The Case Presents Novel, Difficult, and Significant First Amendment Questions,” gets at this point better and echoes something we pointed out in ours. One of the reasons that the First Amendment gets the government out of the speech-controlling business is because agreement on what is the good speech, and what is the bad speech, is so unlikely. And that agreement is unlikely not just among different people, or between the government and the people, but even within “the government” itself. Even just the federal government is made up of three branches, plus “the government” also includes 50 state governments, and all their branches, plus countless local jurisdictions. Getting the government out of the speech controlling business minimizes the chance for any internal tug-of-war among the myriad officials and jurisdictions comprising “the government.”
Furthermore, in a democracy, governments also change. In our brief we noted:
[The DC Circuit] regarded the position of the government, that TikTok warranted this obliterating divestment sanction, as immutably authoritative, even though government can often change its mind, particularly as control of it changes hands. Subsequent administrations might well prefer to protect platforms like TikTok, perhaps because of how it enhances the expressive ability of young people, or supports the creative economy. But while those future governments could repeal the law, or recharacterize China more favorably, once the current government is allowed to destroy TikTok there is no un-ringing of that bell by any future government. In effect, deference to the current one is indifference to any future one, a judicial preference for the speech values this one likes over the ones a future one may favor.
So it was helpful to have Trump arrive to prove our point with his brief, where he made a similar argument about how letting the current government meddle in speech sticks a future one (including his future one) with the results of its choices.
Of course, that’s politics: sitting officials do what they have the power to do, and future officials inherit what came before. Sometimes that inherited policy is not reversible, but one reason the Constitution puts limits on what any current government can do is because it can wield so much power in ways that can cause irreversible harm. Which is what we see here, a current government making a decision affecting speech that will be irreversible, because if allowed to go into effect the law will destroy TikTok, and before Trump could ever have any chance to try to save it.
While for him the ability to do so appears to be a matter of self-interest, and his reasons for not wanting the policy decision of what to do about TikTok to be snatched from him are hardly likely to be noble, underneath his Trumpy motivations is still a fair point: when the government gets involved with speech-related policies, they don’t just control speech for the people but also for the government, including the government the people would choose to represent it next.
Trump also had one other significant argument that made an important point we also tried to drive home. For us it was, “The artificial urgency permeating this law and its review invites other unconstitutional government actions,” while for him it was, “The Case’s Current Schedule Requires the Court To Address Unprecedented, Very Significant Constitutional Questions on a Highly Expedited Basis.” But both briefs were about the alarming speed in which this entire situation is unfolding, with the imminent date of TikTok’s demanded divestment and likely demise rapidly approaching, which so far no court has been willing to stay or enjoin.
Of course, for him he wants the matter to be paused long enough for him to come into power and decide himself how to deal with TikTok, whereas we worry the rush to endorse an unconstitutional law could turn out to be a roadmap for future unconstitutional laws. In our brief we wrote:
The Court of Appeals did not just find that the Act satisfied strict scrutiny; in denying the injunction it accepted that the urgency Congress baked into the Act was warranted. But whether the protections of the First Amendment can give way so quickly is the actual emergency before the Court right now, not just in terms of the ruinous sanction looming over an Internet platform used by countless Americans, but in terms of what it portends for any future speech interest government would attack. If this Act is not enjoined—let alone if it is upheld— it will serve as a roadmap for other unconstitutional legislation by demonstrating how it can escape review. Far from alleviating harm to Americans, it would create a new vector for it. […] [Footnote: If Congress can effectively cause a constitutional injury simply by writing a law that inflicts it quickly, there is no limit to the harm to speech it could cause.]
But even in his brief he fairly points out that there are “very significant questions” at stake, which we need the “breathing space” to deal with, with a more traditional briefing schedule.
There is ample justification for the Court to stay the January 19 deadline—by which divestment for ByteDance must occur, or else TikTok will face an effective shut-down in the United States—while it considers the merits of the case. First, this Court has aptly cautioned against deciding “unprecedented” and “very significant constitutional questions” on a “highly expedited basis.” Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, 616 (2024). Due to the Act’s deadline for divestment and the timing of the D.C. Circuit’s decision, this Court now faces the prospect of deciding extremely difficult questions on exactly such a “highly expedited basis.” Staying this deadline would provide breathing space for the Court to consider the questions on a more measured schedule, and it would provide President Trump’s incoming Administration an opportunity to pursue a negotiated resolution of the conflict.
We also made a similar point:
Without [an injunction] review is needlessly rushed. As it is, parties and amici, and even this Court itself, is left to rush all briefing and oral argument preparation over the winter holidays. The short and inconvenient timeline will inevitably affect the briefs and who is able to participate in briefing. For an issue of this import, where the decision will affect the Internet, and all online expression, as well as offline expression if strict scrutiny remains weakened, it is especially important that all who will be affected be able to weigh in to assist this Court in making the most prudent ruling possible, aided by the most insight. Without an injunction to slow down the timeline and enable that participation, this Court risks making what portends to be a monumental decision without the care such a decision requires.
As it is, despite the major constitutional issues at stake here, this massive fire drill, where everyone had to drop everything and brief in a week over the holidays in order to get a rushed oral argument in two weeks because neither the DC Circuit nor Supreme Court were willing to issue an injunction, has meant that voices are missing here who should have been heard. While amicus briefs did manage to come in, it is far fewer than one would expect given the seriousness of the matter. In fact, it is notable that the Copia Institute and Trump himself were also the only amici participating who operate their own platforms. From his brief:
Further, President Trump is the founder of another resoundingly successful social-media platform, Truth Social. This gives him an in-depth perspective on the extraordinary government power attempted to be exercised in this case—the power of the federal government to effectively shut down a social-media platform favored by tens of millions of Americans, based in large part on concerns about disfavored content on that platform.
Other platform voices were conspicuously absent, as were press or organizations defending offline speech more generally, even though their perspective matters because if the TikTok ban stands the diminished scrutiny that would allow for it will allow all sorts of attacks on them too.
Meanwhile, we also both took issue with the 270-day clock counting down to TikTok’s imminent mandatory divestment. Although while our concern was a manifest injustice that the statutory deadline posed for the public:
It also wrote into the statute a date of enforceability, but this was not a date of enactment. It was not even a date after which a cause of action against TikTok could be brought. It was a date when a presumptive penalty— divestment—could be imposed, with no further opportunity for due process. And although the 270 days between bill passage and enforcement could have been shorter, it still created a very short timeline for constitutional review to be sought. [Footnote: That it was not shorter would seem to undermine the claimed exigence, but the more significant risk is that in the future Congress may write a statute with a period only a fraction as long before the penalty kicks in.]
For him the concern was how this imminent deadline somehow amounted to an injustice to him:
The 270-day deadline imposed by the Act expires on January 19, 2025—one day before President Trump will assume Office as the 47th President of the United States. This unfortunate timing interferes with President Trump’s ability to manage the United States’ foreign policy and to pursue a resolution to both protect national security and save a social-media platform that provides a popular vehicle for 170 million Americans to exercise their core First Amendment rights. The Act imposes the timing constraint, moreover, without specifying any compelling government interest in that particular deadline. In fact, the Act itself contemplates a 90-day extension to the deadline under certain specified circumstances.
Still, he’s right, even if for the wrong reason. And in his brief he even managed to make two other shockingly enlightened points as well. One, that if this sort of government control of platforms is allowed in the United States of America, it will bless other governments elsewhere in the world from doing the same, including to American platforms.
[T]he First Amendment implications of the federal government’s effective shuttering of a social media platform used by 170 million Americans are sweeping and troubling. There are valid concerns that the Act may set a dangerous global precedent by exercising the extraordinary power to shut down an entire social-media platform based, in large part, on concerns about disfavored speech on that platform. Perhaps not coincidentally, soon after the Act was passed, another major Western democracy—Brazil— shut down another entire social-media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), for more than a month, apparently based on that government’s desire to suppress disfavored political speech.
And he also quite fairly pointed out how the DC Circuit’s decision hardly took the interests of TikTok’s users into account, even though they represented the speech interests of Americans:
Moreover, despite the Act’s enormous impact on the speech of 170 million TikTok users, the D.C. Circuit’s opinion grants only cursory consideration to the free-speech interests of Americans, while granting decisive weight and near-plenary deference to the views of national security officials.
Of course, he is largely concerned about their rights only via the warped way he understood them as they were raised by the Murthy v. Missouri litigation, but the point is nevertheless a valid one on its face. And at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter why he filed, or whether he really understands, let alone cares, why a law banning TikTok would be constitutionally abhorrent. If his pushback in any way helps the Supreme Court recognize the constitutional injury that would result if the government could be free to enforce a law like the TikTok ban, unfettered by the Constitution’s prohibitions, and say no to it, then it’s a good thing, no matter how petulant and entitled it is in intention or tone.
Because if this law is constitutionally tolerable, it won’t just be the Congress who could get away with these censorial tactics but any number of state and local jurisdictions, who also could pass whatever unconstitutional garbage they wanted and get away with it if constitutional prohibitions were as so flimsy.
And even Trump himself. So it’s a good thing that with his brief now he’s going to so much effort to make sure that in the future he won’t be able to get away with it either.
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When the NY Times declared in September that “Mark Zuckerberg is Done With Politics,” it was obvious this framing was utter nonsense. It was quite clear that Zuckerberg was in the process of sucking up to Republicans after Republican leaders spent the past decade using him as a punching bag on which they could blame all sorts of things (mostly unfairly).
Now, with Trump heading back to the White House and Republicans controlling Congress, Zuck’s desperate attempts to appease the GOP have reached new heights of absurdity. The threat from Trump that he wanted Zuckerberg to be jailed over a made-up myth that Zuckerberg helped get Biden elected only seemed to cement that the non-stop scapegoating of Zuck by the GOP had gotten to him.
Since the election, Zuckerberg has done everything he can possibly think of to kiss the Trump ring. He even flew all the way from his compound in Hawaii to have dinner at Mar-A-Lago with Trump, before turning around and flying right back to Hawaii. In the last few days, he also had GOP-whisperer Joel Kaplan replace Nick Clegg as the company’s head of global policy. On Monday it was announced that Zuckerberg had also appointed Dana White to Meta’s board. White is the CEO of UFC, but also (perhaps more importantly) a close friend of Trump’s.
Some of the negative reactions to the video are a bit crazy, as I doubt the changes are going to have that big of an impact. Some of them may even be sensible. But let’s break them down into three categories: the good, the bad, and the stupid.
The Good
Zuckerberg is exactly right that Meta has been really bad at content moderation, despite having the largest content moderation team out there. In just the last few months, we’ve talked about multiple stories showcasing really, really terrible content moderation systems at work on various Meta properties. There was the story of Threads banning anyone who mentioned Hitler, even to criticize him. Or banning anyone for using the word “cracker” as a potential slur.
It was all a great demonstration for me of Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem of dealing with content moderation at scale, and how mistakes are inevitable. I know that people within Meta are aware of my impossibility theorem, and have talked about it a fair bit. So, some of this appears to be them recognizing that it’s a good time to recalibrate how they handle such things:
In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.
Leaving aside (for now) the use of the word “censored,” much of this isn’t wrong. For years it felt that Meta was easily pushed around on these issues and did a shit job of explaining why it did things, instead responding reactively to the controversy of the day.
And, in doing so, it’s no surprise that as the complexity of its setup got worse and worse, its systems kept banning people for very stupid reasons.
It actually is a good idea to seek to fix that, and especially if part of the plan is to be more cautious in issuing bans, it seems somewhat reasonable. As Zuckerberg announced in the video:
We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower-severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So, by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
Zuckerberg’s announcement is a tacit admission that Meta’s much-hyped AI is simply not up to the task of nuanced content moderation at scale. But somehow that angle is getting lost amidst the political posturing.
Some of the other policy changes also don’t seem all that bad. We’ve been mocking Meta for its “we’re downplaying political content” stance from the last few years as being just inherently stupid, so it’s nice in some ways to see them backing off of that (though the timing and framing of this decision we’ll discuss in the latter sections of this post):
We’re continually testing how we deliver personalized experiences and have recently conducted testing around civic content. As a result, we’re going to start treating civic content from people and Pages you follow on Facebook more like any other content in your feed, and we will start ranking and showing you that content based on explicit signals (for example, liking a piece of content) and implicit signals (like viewing posts) that help us predict what’s meaningful to people. We are also going to recommend more political content based on these personalized signals and are expanding the options people have to control how much of this content they see.
Finally, most of the attention people have given to the announcement has focused on the plan to end the fact-checking program, with a lot of people freaking out about it. I even had someone tell me on Bluesky that Meta ending its fact-checking program was an “existential threat” to truth. And that’s nonsense. The reality is that fact-checking has always been a weak and ineffective band-aid to larger issues. We called this out in the wake of the 2016 election.
This isn’t to say that fact-checking is useless. It’s helpful in a limited set of circumstances, but too many people (often in the media) put way too much weight on it. Reality is often messy, and the very setup of “fact checking” seems to presume there are “yes/no” answers to questions that require a lot more nuance and detail. Just as an example of this, during the run-up to the election, multiple fact checkers dinged Democrats for calling Project 2025 “Trump’s plan”, because Trump denied it and said he had nothing to do with it.
But, of course, since the election, Trump has hired on a bunch of the Project 2025 team, and they seem poised to enact much of the plan. Many things are complex. Many misleading statements start with a grain of truth and then build a tower of bullshit around it. Reality is not about “this is true” or “this is false,” but about understanding the degrees to which “this is accurate, but doesn’t cover all of the issues” or deal with the overall reality.
So, Zuck’s plan to kill the fact-checking effort isn’t really all that bad. I think too many people were too focused on it in the first place, despite how little impact it seemed to actually have. The people who wanted to believe false things weren’t being convinced by a fact check (and, indeed, started to falsely claim that fact checkers themselves were “biased.”)
Indeed, I’ve heard from folks at Meta that Zuck has wanted to kill the fact-checking program for a while. This just seemed like the opportune time to rip off the band-aid such that it also gains a little political capital with the incoming GOP team.
On top of that, adding in a feature like Community Notes (née Birdwatch from Twitter) is also not a bad idea. It’s a useful feature for what it does, but it’s never meant to be (nor could it ever be) a full replacement for other kinds of trust & safety efforts.
The Bad
So, if a lot of the functional policy changes here are actually more reasonable, what’s so bad about this? Well, first off, the framing of it all. Zuckerberg is trying to get away with the Elon Musk playbook of pretending this is all about free speech. Contrary to Zuckerberg’s claims, Facebook has never really been about free speech, and nothing announced on Tuesday really does much towards aiding in free speech.
I guess some people forget this, but in the earlier days, Facebook was way more aggressive than sites like Twitter in terms of what it would not allow. It very famously had a no nudity policy, which created a huge protest when breastfeeding images were removed. The idea that Facebook was ever designed to be a “free speech” platform is nonsense.
Indeed, if anything, it’s an admission of Meta’s own self-censorship. After all, the entire fact-checking program was an expression of Meta’s own position on things. It was “more speech.” Literally all fact-checking is doing is adding context and additional information, not removing content. By no stretch of the imagination is fact-checking “censorship.”
Of course, bad faith actors, particularly on the right, have long tried to paint fact-checking as “censorship.” But this talking point, which we’ve debunked before, is utter nonsense. Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is.
Also bad is Zuckerberg’s misleading use of the word “censorship” to describe content moderation policies. We’ve gone over this many, many times, but using censorship as a description for private property owners enforcing their own rules completely devalues the actual issue with censorship, in which it is the government suppressing speech. Every private property owner has rules for how you can and cannot interact in their space. We don’t call it “censorship” when you get tossed out of a bar for breaking their rules, nor should it be called censorship when a private company chooses to block or ban your content for violating its rules (even if you argue the rules are bad or were improperly enforced.)
The Stupid
The timing of all of this is obviously political. It is very clearly Zuckerberg caving to more threats from Republicans, something he’s been doing a lot of in the last few months, while insisting he was done caving to political pressure.
I mean, even Donald Trump is saying that Zuckerberg is doing this because of the threats that Trump and friends have leveled in his direction:
Q: Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?TRUMP: Probably. Yeah. Probably.
I raise this mainly to point out the ongoing hypocrisy of all of this. For years we’ve been told that the Biden campaign (pre-inauguration in 2020 and 2021) engaged in unconstitutional coercion to force social media platforms to remove content. And here we have the exact same thing, except that it’s much more egregious and Trump is even taking credit for it… and you won’t hear a damn peep from anyone who has spent the last four years screaming about the “censorship industrial complex” pushing social media to make changes to moderation practices in their favor.
Turns out none of those people really meant it. I know, not a surprise to regular readers here, but it should be called out.
Also incredibly stupid is this, which we’ll quote straight from Zuck’s Threads thread about all this:
That’s Zuck saying:
Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
There’s a pretty big assumption in there which is both false and stupid: that people who live in California are inherently biased, while people who live in Texas are not. People who live in both places may, in fact, be biased, though often not in the ways people believe. As a few people have pointed out, more people in Texas voted for Kamala Harris (4.84 million) than did so in New York (4.62 million). Similarly, almost as many people voted for Donald Trump in California (6.08 million) as did so in Texas (6.39 million).
There are people with all different political views all over the country. The idea that everyone in one area believes one thing politically, or that you’ll get “less bias” in Texas than in California, is beyond stupid. All it really does is reinforce misguided stereotypes.
The whole statement is clearly for political show.
It also sucks for Meta employees who work in trust & safety, who want access to certain forms of healthcare or want net neutrality, or other policies that are super popular among voters across the political spectrum, but which Texas has decided are inherently not allowed.
Finally, there’s this stupid line in the announcement from Joel Kaplan:
We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.
I’m sure that sounded good to whoever wrote it, but it makes no sense at all. First off, thanks to the Speech and Debate Clause, literally anything is legal to say on the floor of Congress. It’s like the one spot in the world where there are no rules at all over what can be said. Why include that? Things could literally be said on the floor of Congress that would violate the law on Meta platforms.
Also, TV stations literally have restrictions known as “standards and practices” that are way, way, way more restrictive than any set of social media content moderation rules. Neither of these are relevant metrics to compare to social media. What jackass thought that using examples of (1) the least restricted place for speech and (2) a way more restrictive place for speech made this a reasonable argument to make here?
In the end, the reality here is that nothing announced this week will really change all that much for most users. Most users don’t run into content moderation all that often. Fact-checking happens but isn’t all that prominent. But all of this is a big signal that Zuckerberg, for all his talk of being “done with politics” and no longer giving in to political pressure on moderation, is very engaged in politics and a complete spineless pushover for modern Trumpist politicians.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
Customers are reacting. According to Review’s annual State of Consumer Media Spending Report, the average American spent 23 percent less on streaming subscriptions in 2024 than in 2023. Not because streaming was cheaper, but because customers are being more particular about which streaming service they subscribe to in a bid to do something about soaring costs:
“A total 27.8% of Americans report experiencing “streaming fatigue,” defined as that exact feeling of being overwhelmed with the increasing number of streaming apps.”
Hunting and pecking through eight different streaming services to find the programs and movies you like is getting increasingly annoying, especially when every one of those services is now intent on constant rate hikes and nickel-and-diming users with stuff like password sharing crackdowns.
If Trump 2.0 truly delivers on its obvious plan to dismantle what’s left of U.S. consumer protection, labor rights, and corporate oversight, there’s a not insubstantial risk consumers will face higher costs then ever, driving them to tighten their purse strings further.
Here’s where Cory Doctorow’s enshittification truly steps in.
The reduced revenues from people cancelling streaming services for months at a time will create new pressure on streaming giants to deliver Wall Street those sweet quarterly returns. Streaming profitability was already a challenge (NBCUniversal’s Peacock has always bled money). Improving service quality and expanding catalogs won’t be at the top of the executive menu.
So now the race will be on to thrill Wall Street and goose revenues in other ways. That means more price hikes, more pointless mergers (see: the whole AT&T Time Warner Discovery mess), and more bizarre restrictions. I’d also suspect they’ll soon take another terrible cue from traditional cable: cutting corners on customer service, and making it increasingly difficult to cancel service without headaches.
At which point the customer annoyance accelerates, free services like piracy become even more attractive, and the disruption/evolution cycle begins all over again.
