You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg’s five-minute video about how Facebook is doing literal U-turns on many of their content moderation policies.

If you didn’t watch it, I guess you could, but you might just come away so upset and disheartened by how a man who initially built a website to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard could become so culturally powerful at a global level.

I have used social media for a long time. I have seen Facebook and Twitter both go from novel status-sharing to cultural battlegrounds. I have seen them both pretend to grow up; neither platform was ever built on the premise of providing “free speech” to the world. Pretending they were is just propaganda from their respective founders. It was an evolution formed from opportunity.

Setting aside what free speech means, it is something valued by people the world over. As a selling point, it is universal. The easiest way to capture the world as your user base is to advertise something everyone wants.

As long as people post on websites they do not own, there will always be content moderation. It will just specifically target different groups based on the political climate. It’s not about free speech. It’s about the speech the platform allows and amplifies.

The result of everyone in the world posting whatever they want has not been overwhelmingly positive, however.

Regardless of content moderation policies, while social media has undoubtedly contributed positively to the world by exposing reprehensible behavior and rapidly distributing evidence on a global scale to hold some people accountable, it has also failed in equal measure. It is not always successful as a means for accountability. Arguably, it is an ineffective means of doing so.

In addition, while these platforms have been been great tools for organizing like-minded groups of people who can put pressure on policy at local, federal, and even global levels, that is not limited to …good people.

The decisions Mark Zuckerberg is making are as unsurprising as they are terrible. When I watched the video, Mark said he would move the content moderation team out of California. I whispered, “to Texas,” just before he said the same.

Twitter’s trajectory is in lockstep. I won’t say X is as bad as it can get, because I believe it can become much worse. Both of these platforms will get worse.

This is gonna be so, so bad.

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