These days I do most of my microblogging (now there’s a blast from the past) at Threads, the Meta-owned Twitter alternative that is moving ahead of Bluesky and Mastodon, if not ahead of Twitter itself. Threads is filled with self-congratulatory posts about how nice everyone is along with occasional criticism of people for not walking away completely from Elon Musk, who has transformed X/Twitter from the hellsite it already was into something even worse.
Well, lest we forget, here’s the top to Brian Fung’s CNN story on the latest in a lawsuit brought against Meta by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram, at times directly overruling some of his most senior lieutenants, according to internal communications made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the company.
The newly unsealed communications in the lawsuit — filed originally by Massachusetts last month in a state court — allegedly show how Zuckerberg ignored or shut down top executives, including Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States.
Mosseri, in case you don’t know, is the guy who’s in charge of Threads. As for the great Threads versus Twitter debate, well, pick your favorite evil billionaire. At least Zuckerberg and Mosseri seem to want Threads to be a well-run platform that makes money rather than a plaything for a right-wing sociopath — which is what Twitter has devolved into.
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And let’s not forget that Meta/Facebook knowingly allowed a grotesk hate-speech and ethnic cleansing campaign in Myanmar. Thousands of Rohingya ethnic minority were killed.
If you want the incredible story, read the thoroughly researched multi-part series by Erin Kissane, co-founder of the Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project (https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series).
Zuckerberg and top Meta management was intimately aware of what was going on in Myanmar as it happened and he decided that having more users was more important than human lives. At the time, Facebook made all sorts of claims about “doing better” in the future blah, blah, blah.
Here’s the kicker:
“In 2022, Global Witness came back for one more look at Meta’s operations in Myanmar, this time with eight examples of real hate speech aimed at the Rohingya—actual posts from the period of the genocide, all taken from the UN Human Rights Council findings I’ve been linking to so frequently in this series. They submitted these real-life examples of hate speech to Meta as Burmese-language Facebook advertisements.
Meta accepted all eight ads.”