Stop feeding Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta monster. It’s a beast | Opinion

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched his latest social media platform, Threads, one day after a federal judge in Louisiana ruled the Biden administration likely colluded with Facebook and other such sites to censor unfavorable views during the pandemic.

The connection between the two events went largely unremarked upon. Progressives were just tickled that Zuckerberg was mounting a competitive challenge to Twitter and its dastardly owner Elon Musk, who dared to challenge their exclusive grip on social media, that they didn’t want to be bothered with the danger of Facebook’s information empire gaining even more dominance.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, reported 30 million sign-ups in the first hours after the launch of Threads, an app that looks remarkably similar to Twitter. That number is bound to keep soaring, since Threads is linked to another Zuckerberg company, Instagram, which has 2.35 billion active monthly users.

Facebook itself has nearly 3 billion accounts, while yet another Meta enterprise, WhatsApp, boasts of 2.75 billion active monthly users.

Even assuming generous overlap among Meta’s various user bases, it’s a fair estimate that on any given day Zuckerberg’s online products are reaching up to half the world’s population.

Zuckerberg has not proved to be a good steward of such enormous power, as the Louisiana court ruling suggests.

District Judge Terry Doughty, issued a sweeping ruling banning a long list of federal officials, including White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and all employees of the Justice Department and FBI, from having contact with Facebook and other social-media sites for the purpose of infringing on First Amendment rights.

The judge declared the cooperation between the White House and social-media companies to censor speech “Orwellian.” Facebook was the key player.

Zuckerberg has acknowledged taking regular calls from administration officials during the pandemic, and that Facebook censored posts later proved to be true at the behest of federal health officials who wanted to control the COVID-19 narrative.

This came at a time when Americans needed and deserved the maximum amount of information about a virus that was threatening their lives and livelihoods.

And yet the most powerful government officials were conspiring with the world’s most powerful information company to limit and distort that information. And for one purpose: To make the people more pliable and easier to control. Orwellian indeed.

Zuckerberg also has used his immense influence to put his thumb on the political scale. In 2020, he spent $400 million to fund local election operations. One of the efforts he backed sent $144 million to eight swing states, 90% of which went to counties that supported Joe Biden.

Conservatives have long complained of being censored by Facebook and other social-media sites, a claim Zuckerberg and his counterparts deny. But he clearly has an interest in politics, and the ability to sway the electoral process by controlling the information his users see.

And now he has another tool to use, and too little competition. Twitter, with its 450 million active monthly users, is a poor counter to Meta’s universe.

Follow the thread. The potential reach of Zuckerberg’s new site and his propensity for censorship are not healthy for a nation that depends on the free flow of information.

Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The Detroit News.

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