Roasting the Press Episode 54 for Sunday, January 12th, 2025
Facebook has the Potential for a New Openness, Terry Gilliam’s Movie “Brazil” is Forty Years Old, Two Legacy Media Stories on the Same Topic & TSA Scanner Opt-Outs.
Facebook has the Potential for a New Openness,
We start tonight’s show with Meta, Mark Zuckerberg and the new rules of the road for Facebook.
The January 10th, 2025 New York Times post, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era,” is a reasonable overview of what happened.
Essentially, “After visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump in November, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to relax Meta’s speech policies.”
A public announcement of the changes was made on January 7th, 2025.
Here’s a quick overview of Zuckerberg’s reasoning, courtesy of the January 11th, 2025 Press for Truth on Bitchute post, “The Truth About FaceBook Censorship Moving Forward Into “MAGA 2025.”
Legacy media is up in arms over the changes which are expected to turn Facebook into a more freewheeling, more open and perhaps more honest social media outlet.
An example is the January 9th, 2025 The Intercept post, “Leaked Meta Rules: Users Are Free to Post “Mexican Immigrants Are Trash!” or “Trans People Are Immoral.” Another example is the January 11th, 2025 CNN post, “Stelter: ‘Zuckerberg wants to get off Trump’s enemy list’.”
But perhaps the strangest legacy media posts on the topic are the January 10th, 2025 Bloomberg post, “Zuckerberg Says Most Companies Need More ‘Masculine Energy’,” and the damn peculiar January 12th, 2025 NDTV World post “Mark Zuckerberg Orders Removal Of Tampons From Men's Bathrooms At Meta Offices.”
While the incoming Trump administration seems happy with the changes, the outgoing Biden administration, as outlined in the January 11th, 2025 Epoch Times post, “Biden Calls Meta’s Decision to End Fact-Checking Program ‘Really Shameful,’” is not.
Of course, Facebook and Meta may have more to worry about than simply the incoming Trump administration.
As outlined in the November 22nd, 2024 Bloomberg post, “Meta Must Face Investor Suit After Supreme Court Drops Case,” the social media giant is also facing an upcoming lawsuit that accuses the company of misleading shareholders about the data-harvesting scandal involving political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica back in 2016.
In Canada, response to the changes seems a little more nuanced.
The best overview of what’s going on is the January 8th, 2025 Michael Geist post, “New Era and New Risks: Meta’s Content Moderation Reforms and Freedom of Expression Online,” which notes the “shifting political sands that seemingly pressured even the world’s largest social media company to pay heed.”
According to Geist:
That means the fact checkers are gone, replaced by the Twitter (X) model of community notes.
Moreover, the company is moving its content moderation team from California to Texas (a nod to claims the California-based teams were biased), increasing the amount of political content in user feeds, and pledging to work with the Trump administration to combat content regulation elsewhere, including in Europe and South America.
… In the U.S., it seems likely that efforts to curry favour with the Trump Administration will not end with Meta and that many other companies are likely to follow a similar approach.
In Canada, the online harms bill is dead and changes may be coming for the digital policies that are now law. In fact, U.S. pressure to change those laws may be on the agenda.
Is Zuckerberg just switching to the side who he feels is the most powerful. No one knows but independent observers are waiting to see how the new content moderation systems actually work before passing judgement.
Stay tuned.
Terry Gilliam’s Movie “Brazil” is Forty Years Old.
Terry Gilliam’s dystopia “Brazil” is 40 years old.
Here’s a video on the dystopia’s ongoing relevance, the January 11th, 2025 Alex Fox on YouTube post, “40 Years of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."
Two Legacy Media Stories on the Same Topic
Since her conviction for murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the hospital where she worked, Nurse Lucy Letby has insisted on her innocence.
The August 18th, 2023 CNN post, “‘I am evil,’ wrote British nurse found guilty of murdering seven babies in her care,” notes her original conviction and provides a perspective highly favorable of the UK justice system, which initially tried and convicted her.
Two years later, and as outlined in the January 12th, 2025 NTE post, “Calls for retrial of Lucy Letby continue to reverberate,” it looks like Letby might just be on the brink of getting a second chance to make her case.
Both stories use roughly the same sets of data, derived from original trial records, to draw opposite conclusions.
TSA Scanner Opt-Out
And finally tonight, here’s the January 12th, 2025 Mongo Minds on Bitchute post, “TSA Scanner Opt Out for Sunday.”
“Roasting the Press,” is an open forum with new media journalists critiquing and complaining about our well funded competitors, the stories they create and the techniques they use.
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