Free speech and potential censorship are at the heart of two separate tech stories that are dominating headlines around the world as we kick off the new week.
Following the arrest in Paris over the weekend of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, which quickly turned into a flashpoint about free speech, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter on Monday to Republican congressman Jim Jordan that ventured into related territory. Zuckerberg’s letter made news, specifically, as it relates to censorship demands from the Biden White House during the Covid pandemic, and it’s worth reading in its entirety (which you can do so here).
The Facebook co-founder, in short, now says that the administration was wrong to pressure his companies to censor certain COVID-related content (“including humor and satire”). And that Meta was wrong to comply with those requests as fully as it did.
In 2021, Zuckerberg wrote, “Senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own those decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today” (emphasis added).
My take: Obviously, this is the right thing to say now — now, being the big caveat. Regrettably, the damage stemming from certain aspects of the pandemic response has already been done and will probably be long-lasting.
No one, for example, should have needed the benefit of hindsight to surmise that making people’s lives “difficult” (in Dr. Fauci’s words) to prod them to get vaccinated was probably not the ideal approach. Or that forcing people to stay home from work, church, and school so that they don’t inadvertently infect grandma — while at the same time allowing popular political protests to take place — kind of strained credulity.
Zuckerberg’s new remarks about COVID censorship speak to one of the most under-appreciated side effects of the pandemic — namely, the detrimental co-mingling of public health and ideology, which you don’t have to be a genius to see will make the next pandemic even harder to bring under control.
Elon Musk on Monday voiced his support for one of the most polarizing artificial intelligence policy proposals in the nation, backing a California bill that would require large-scale models to undergo safety testing.
Senate Bill 1047 has been lambasted by tech giants like Marc Andreesen and OpenAI for what they say are vague and burdensome regulations that would have a chilling effect on open-sourced models. Its author, Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, says he’s trying to prevent catastrophic harm to humanity, such as bad actors using AI to develop biological weapons.
Musk, in a post on X, said the decision to support the bill was a “tough call and will probably make some people upset,” but that he thinks it should pass. His endorsement comes at a critical inflection point for the proposal, which must pass the Legislature by the end of the week to get to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.
“For over 20 years, I have been an advocate for AI regulation, just as we regulate any product/technology that is a potential risk to the public,” he wrote.
As the head of Tesla, X, and SpaceX, Musk has previously urged leading artificial intelligence labs to pause the training of new super-powerful systems, but more recently has embraced generative AI. X recently launched a tool called Grok, allowing users to create and post computer-generated images based on a text prompt. That’s already raised alarms about misinformation and deep fakes flooding the social media platform.
Musk’s position puts him at odds with not only powerful players in Silicon Valley but several Democrats in Congress who have spoken out against the bill in recent weeks — including Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Ro Khanna, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It also creates a bit of an awkward dynamic for Wiener, who has engaged in heated debates with Musk over legislation protecting the privacy of LGBTQ youth.
Wiener did not immediately comment on Musk’s support.
Mark Zuckerberg comes clean and finally admits what everyone already knows he and META did to influence the 2020 election. https://t.co/TwA5zIRwPK
— Rep. Harriet Hageman (@RepHageman) August 27, 2024