Is Mark Zuckerberg ending social media?

Disclaimer: The following is a transcript of this video episode. It has been edited for grammar and clarity using an AI tool.

In India, we have this term called Godi Media, where a mainstream media outlet or a television channel or a newspaper, usually a Hindi newspaper (but English newspapers have also started doing this), has bent over backward to accommodate the needs of whoever is in power. This means that a politician, a minister, or a political party with a certain agenda asks them to treat certain topics as things that should not be spread, and certain topics as things that should be spread. They bend over backward to accommodate this. They do anything they can to make the minister, the political party, or anyone who follows that political ideology happy. They don’t care about anything other than the fact that their profit margins might be affected by those in power being unfriendly towards them, leading to the potential loss of government ads or some such issues.

Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who’s at the helm of Meta Platforms (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and whatnot), has decided to go full-on Godi Media. In anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to power, he is making some bizarre changes to the social media platforms he owns and controls. I am not complaining that Facebook is going to end. I’m a huge fan of the current social networks ending and being replaced by something more valuable—something that is genuinely a social network. But even I did not anticipate that this manner of suicide would be committed by someone like Mark Zuckerberg.

Let me tell you what all he’s doing to Meta, and then you can tell me if you think this is better for the company or for social media. The first move is this: Meta now allows people to call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill. I don’t even know where to begin with this. You have a social network, and a huge number of people who use the social network are non-binary, non-heterosexual, or non-gender normative. They rely on social media as a place to express themselves because their family, friends, and the places where they live are not friendly toward their existence. They have managed to build communities online by making use of the social network. But now, the social network is saying, “We are going to subject them to the same kind of bullying that they experience in the real world.” Meta is not going to protect them.

There was even a news item about certain themes in chat that allowed people to express their LGBTQ+ identities, and now those themes are being removed because Mark Zuckerberg is afraid that homophobes, transphobes, and others will get offended by Meta allowing people to express their gender identity. Even people within Meta are unhappy about this because they fear that this is not only a terrible thing to do but might also backlash and harm the company. This is understandable. But Facebook has never stood on its own two feet when it comes to relationships with those in power. If Mark Zuckerberg can bend over backward to accommodate the Hindutva crowd in India, it’s not surprising that his subservience to those in power would eventually affect his business decisions in the U.S.

Another recent news item discusses how Meta is now encouraging the creation of AI bots on its platforms. Soon, users will interact with AI bots online the same way they interact with real humans. This raises a fundamental question: What does “social” mean in social media? Is it interactions between humans and machines