MSNBC Hosts Blast Mark Zuckerberg for Giving ‘Bigots’ a Platform in Policy Flip
Hosts of MSNBC’s The Weekend Show ripped Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday as fresh details emerged showing just how far the Meta CEO is planning to roll back his platforms’ content moderation policies.
In a shock announcement, the Facebook founder said this week that his company, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, would be scrapping its fact-checking program in a move critics have slammed as a cynical pledge of allegiance to incoming Republican president Donald Trump.
A leaked Meta training manual, published by The Intercept on Thursday, has since revealed the kind of toxic and harmful content to which Zuckerberg now appears eager to open the floodgates.
MSNBC’s hosts expressed unmitigated shock and horror reading out just some of the sample posts the tech giant will soon consider “permissible.”
As Symone Sanders-Townsend put it, “Oh, my God! This is for the bigots and the people that hate other people! This is not for most Americans. This is for the internet bullies. And I just, I don’t under… that’s not about fairness… why do the bigots need a platform?”
Co-host Alicia Menendez swiftly chimed in, “I also thought it was interesting… Did you see this, Michael? That in their statement they said, ‘Well, if they can say things on the floor of Congress, they should be able to say…’ Well, I wouldn’t use the floor of Congress right now as my metric.”
Michael Steele, for his part, was entirely in agreement. “Where is the line in which we, as a society, say that, you know, putting suggestive comments beneath the picture of a young girl under the age of 17 is OK? Is that what we’re saying now, Mark Zuckerberg, you can do that?” he said.
He then went on, “When bad things happen because of what you’re platforming, you’re going to sit back and go, ‘Well, we’re not responsible, Section 203, we’re protected, we don’t have, we have no responsibility, it’s just a platform. Bull! It’s more than that and you know it.”