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Notes -
My translation:
"We were just offered amazing tax incentives in Texas, and the fact checkers were really expensive. We really didn't want to decrease profit margins as user interaction on our website declines, and also please do not notice how we attempted to fill the userbase with fake ai users just a week ago. We think conservative users are particularly gullible to this scam"
You are not sufficiently blackpilled if you go to bat for Zuckerberg, of all people.
Greg Abbott regularly courts companies to relocate to Texas, but when he can reasonably expect not to be contradicted by that company's owner/CEO he claims credit for the jobs from it. If Texas offered some kind of sweetheart deal, Greg Abbott would be bragging about it.
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More so than tax incentives they don't benefit from going to war against a large portion of their base. Facebook's users in the US coincide fairly well with boomer conservatives. Alienating millions of users for purity isn't going to be profitable. Driving millions of users away by being woke or even banning them is bad for business. Besides, politics creates user engagement.
At peak banning even Trump supporters were getting banned. That is a huge demographic for facebook adds, partially because of their numbers and partially because trump does well among reasonably well of people that can be target through digital advertising. Democrats have a lot of underclass voters which aren't great for advertising and their more elite voters are less likely to want to use facebook.
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Zuck was pressured to ban Holocaust denial on the platform like it had already been on Amazon, Youtube, etc. but he held strong until they brought out the big guns with the huge 2020 ad boycotts. He at least put up some resistance rather than immediately going to the "of course we can't have that content, it's unconscionable" route. So that earned him some credit even though he eventually folded. It will be interesting to see if Holocaust revisionism gets unbanned on that platform like it's tacitly been unbanned on X.
He did mention growing censorship laws, and Holocaust denial censorship is growing rapidly in Europe with new laws in new countries continuing apace. Makes me wonder if he is going to reverse course on banning that as well. I, for the record, do not think the Fact Checker reform is just about saving costs I think Zuckerberg is being sincere in the video.
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