Zuckerberg’s Admission Unveils Nothing New: Social Media Professor

For more on this, we're joined by Andrew Selipak, social media professor from the University of Florida. Andrew, it's good to have you. Are you surprised to hear that social media companies are working directly with the government to censor information? No. I mean, this is exactly what we saw in the Twitter files. This is what we were told by, you know, the massive sort of release of Twitter files that we got from the different stories from the different reporters. We knew this was happening. We knew this was going on. We had the receipts from all the different Twitter files. It was just that we knew it from the perspective of the only platform that was admitting it at the time, which was Twitter, after the Elon Musk purchase. This wasn't done when it was under the previous management. But we knew this was going on. We knew this was happening. This is just the first time that Facebook, and particularly Mark Zuckerberg, have admitted what we already knew. Yeah, you mentioned the Twitter files. At Facebook, Zuckerberg has said he won't do it again, what he said he did. But do you think it could be happening on other platforms as we speak? Well, I mean, we have to look and see what Zuckerberg is in control of. You know, this is WhatsApp. This is going to be Facebook and Instagram. Those are billions of users and billions of accounts right there. We can probably be pretty sure that this is still going on on the Google platforms, whether this is through Google search or through YouTube. It's probably not going on on Rumble. It's not going on on X anymore. And then we start going into the more niche platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest. So I think really the biggest one to be concerned about right now is whether or not Zuckerberg is being honest and that there's not content that's being limited on his platforms. But we do know that this is still going on. We still get the warnings, we've seen stories about what's going on with Google in terms of how you can see certain stories by some political candidates over other political candidates through a search. So yes, it's probably still going on on Google. The other platforms I don't think are as big of a concern considering the size, scope and reach of Meta and Google. But the thing is, we really just don't exactly know what's being spoken about behind closed doors between the leaders of these organizations, these social media companies, and various governments, I mean, especially Europe with the DSA over there. Next, the White House has defended telling platforms to censor COVID-related content, but suppressing the story about Hunter Biden's laptop in the run up to the election seems purely political. Does it harm the case for governments being the ones to decide what is misinformation and what is not? Well, it's not just governments that are doing it because the platforms had to agree. Now, we have to keep in mind that if the DOJ, FBI, NSA, CIA are sending these email messages to a platform or a company, you know, even if there's not the explicit sort of idea that if you don't, these are the ramifications for it. You know, if you're a CEO or sort of a C-suite person at one of these companies and you get a lot of email from the NSA, CIA, DOJ, you're probably going to do whatever is being requested of you. And I think that's where really there's the big concern is that it's not necessarily coming just from the executive branch in terms of when we think of the president or, you know, someone from the president's office. This is coming from that sort of giant tentacle of government agencies that could all be pressuring social media companies to limit what they're doing. But I think the big thing when we're talking about COVID is we know that there's been a lot of COVID information that's been out there that's been told as misinformation that turned out to be true or information that was given by the government, whether it was six feet of distancing, any mask, if you get the vaccine, you can't then get the virus. I think the big thing is sort of the election interference that we see from the Hunter Biden laptop story, because that was something where it wasn't just warning labels or we were told it's misinformation. You know, you had platforms that were completely deleting them off there. You couldn't DM them to somebody else on Twitter pre-must. You had Meta with Facebook and Instagram where it was really throttling down the visibility of those posts. So what we're seeing there is not just something where there was warning labels or this could be misinformation, but what could be construed by some as actual election interference. Andrew, can you explain exactly how these platforms censor topics when they choose to do so? I mean, we're talking about how governments put pressure on these organizations, but then, of course, the leaders then choose to do what the government says or something like it. How does that actually happen after they've chosen to follow through? Well, this is one of those things where we don't necessarily have the transparency from the platforms themselves. We don't know exactly when they do things. We don't know exactly how they do things. This is part of the fact that social media, to a large extent, still is very much a wild west where we don't know exactly what they're doing. We don't get notified of what they're doing, and they don't really have a customer service to find out what they're doing. But with an educated guess, we know that they can take certain topics and sort of throttle down visibility. Normally, a post shows up in your timeline based on who you've interacted with before, the amount of interaction the post gets, how recent it is. But what they can do with certain topics, whether it's certain words, certain people, they can really kind of decrease the visibility or completely basically knock out a piece of content, like we saw the Hunter Biden laptop story, from being visible for people engaging on it. And it completely changes how we understand the algorithms to work as they currently do. Yeah. And that Hunter Biden laptop story was said to have had significant influence on the outcome of the election. Over 10 points, if I remember correctly. My last question is, may not exactly be in your wheelhouse, but because you focus on social media, I think you might be able to have an interesting answer. How can a regular user of these platforms determine what actually is true and false, given that some of these platforms are actually suppressing information that's sometimes just true? Well, a lot of people don't care if it's true or false. We want to believe what fits within our current narrative. So if you are of one political persuasion or the other and you see content that sort of supports your political view, don't necessarily care if it's true or not, because we don't like to live in this sort of state of dissonance where we're presented with information that contradicts what we believe. So a lot of people, when they see misinformation, so long as it matches their worldview, they're fine with it. It's probably actually a small percentage of users who want to take the time and investigate the stories that they see and investigate the content that they see on social media, which is, I think, one of the big benefits of community notes on X, which don't appear on the other platforms because it's users providing feedback and debunking posts or supporting posts, as opposed to what we see on Google with YouTube or Meta or with Instagram and Facebook, where it's the platforms and the moderators on those platforms who are deciding if something is misinformation, putting a misinformation label on it or throttling down the visibility of the post. I'm hearing you advocate for a deeper understanding of the concept of truth and the pursuit of truth. Social media professor Andrew Selipak, thank you for your time. Thank you.