Casey Newton

You know, trust and safety used to be a really vocal part of the tech industry, and they advocated for a lot of good pro-social civic values.

They talked a lot about human rights.

They tried to bake human rights principles into the policies that these platforms observed when they were moderating content.

And so I just sort of had a natural affinity to them, right?

Like, in my view, these were the good guys.

And then Trump gets swept back into power.

A bunch of layoffs happen.

Every platform...

decides almost without exception that their best move is to try to curry favor with the Trump administration.

And all of these folks just get pushed aside.

The ones who were the most vocal about human rights principles disappear.

And all of a sudden, you have people like Joel Kaplan at Meta running the policy operation.

And his main job is just to essentially get Donald Trump to like Mark Zuckerberg and try to ensure that we get whatever we want.

And it's been hugely effective.

for them, by the way.

Mark Zuckerberg has gotten an insane number of things from Donald Trump, and I'm sure he'll get more as the years go on.

So I got a lot of pushback from the trust and safety community when I wrote this piece, because I was essentially calling them out, just being like, hey, where are you guys?

Are you actually going to get on a microphone anywhere and say, hey, it's really bad what is happening to our industry?

And what they told me very justifiably was like, we do not have the power that you think we have.

And also when we do speak up and when people do know our names, we get death threats and we get hounded to the ends of the earth.