Amazon Prime is making a documentary about Melania Trump, they started filming in December and they expect to have a theatrical and streaming release later this year. Amazon said it was “excited to share this truly unique story.” Filming started just a month after Bezos killed an endorsement of Trump’s presidential election opponent at his other company, the Washington Post. The newspaper is best known for toppling a corrupt American president but now is known for being owned by someone willing to kowtow to arguably our most corrupt President of all time. Oh, how the tides have turned America, we hardly recognize ye as yourself of olde. You used to be tougher than this.
In other news, Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta is ending its already unbelievably weak attempt at keeping disinformation from completely overwhelming Facebook and Instagram. In a statement, littered with falsehoods, he seemed to be talking directly to Donald Trump. Meta even granted an exclusive interview with Fox and Friends to discuss the changes, probably just to make sure that Trump heard about it right away. Mark’s curly-headed California chic sounded strangely like Bezo’s reasoning for killing the Washington Post’s editorial board’s endorsement of Harris. They’re going back to their roots he said. Back to letting free expression reign. They tried to battle disinformation but their fact-checkers ended up being too politically biased and that has destroyed trust. Lol, he actually said that with a straight face.
Have you been on Facebook lately? It’s literally littered with disinformation. There is so much AI pink slime clogging up everyone’s feeds that it’s like walking through a park in early spring after months of people not cleaning up after their dogs. It’s disgusting. But it’s mostly been benign misinformation about celebrities, fake history, and other things that while annoying, are mostly not all that dangerous. I mean who cares if every famous person you’ve ever heard of is being misrepresented by some AI-written drivel sitting above an AI-created plasticky image, right? Or how many historical images of giants can AI produce in a day? No, actually all of that sucks too. But that’s not what Mark is talking about. He’s talking about unleashing the same level of disinformation that Elon Musk let take over on X. He said that directly, they’re getting rid of their already ineffectual fact-checkers and reverting to community notes, just like Twitter did when Elon Musk took over.
If you don’t know what community notes are they are basically a way for users to fight with bots over what reality is. Okay, okay, just kidding, that’s just what I think it ends up boiling down to. How it’s supposed to work on X is that anyone, including bots, can add a community note, and then supposedly it’s reviewed by a human, and then accurate notes are then attached to the post and people can review it and decide for themselves what’s true. So basically it’s a way for people to fight with bots about what reality is, because who has time for that? Bots and providers of disinformation that’s who, they have all day.
And of course, the other thing Mark signaled, or said outright for Trump to hear, is that they will stop throttling politics and hot-button issues, like immigration and gender. They need to instead worry about the real problems of drugs, terrorism and child exploitation and restore free expression on their platform. Awe, he must really care. As Mark put it, after the 2016 election the ‘legacy media’, that’s the nice way to say lamestream media in code, talked non-stop about the dangers of disinformation and Meta tried to respond to that but, well, they failed so now it’s time to give in to the purveyors of disinformation.
Perfect timing isn’t it? Because in the coming months, Trump and company are going to be asking you to disbelieve what you’re seeing with your own eyes. To disbelieve what reputable news sources will be reporting and to buy into whatever nonsense they’ll be using as a smokescreen to fool their base. Nothing different from what they’re doing now but I’m thinking that they’re going to take it to a whole new level. And their base, along with an army of bots, will be screaming cruising along for the ride, just like back in the good old days, remember those? We didn’t have AI-driven pink slime but boy did we have a lot of yelling. Soon we’ll have both because this change signals that the existing somewhat benign AI ooze will soon be taken over by the likes of Steve Bannon, or worse, and weaponized like we haven’t seen yet. And Meta will let us attach notes so we can decide for ourselves what reality is, I’m sure that’ll be civil.
So, back to Zuck, who also said that this new policy will first be rolled out in the United States. Of course, it will because the European Union would never allow it anyway and a Biden administration would have fought it as well. But a Trump administration? This is exactly the gift they wanted. And Zuck, who is worth 200 Billion and has almost complete control of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger just handed it to them without even the slightest hint of protest or a fight. Think, just for a moment, if he had a spine, or morals, or values, or integrity of any kind; what he could have done with all of his wealth and influence, but chose not to, instead he chose to throw his lot in with the likes of Trump and Musk.
Yep, Mark Zuckerberg is a coward and he doesn’t care what happens to the people who use his platforms or the country he grew up in.
So, I didn’t delete Twitter because I follow these scumbags and write about it. I’ll probably do the same with FB, but it’s already a terrible experience and it’s about to get worse. Say hi from my website, maybe you’re reading this there already. You can find my phone number and email there. Say hi on BlueSky, It’s lonely over there, everyone said to go there but it’s a ghost town. Maybe we should change that. In any case, stay safe, the villains have left the shadows.