Zuck Finds His Spine
Plus: The new manifest destiny, California wildfires, Canada's immigration troubles, and more...
A late mea culpa: "After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy," Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday in a video posted to Facebook and a message posted to Threads. Referring to Meta's trust and safety team tasked with content moderation, he said: "We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S."
"We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship," said Zuckerberg, announcing sweeping changes: No more (partisan) fact-checkers (appointed from on high); a community notes system, akin to Elon Musk's approach at X, will replace the old. Certain content—topics like immigration and gender—will no longer be so restricted. And the trust and safety team will be relocated from California to Texas, which Zuckerberg claims "will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content" (as if Texas has no lefty tech employees).
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But Zuckerberg claims he wants to work with Donald Trump, once he takes office, to counter global censorship, detailing Europe's "ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship" as well as Latin America's secret courts "that can order companies to quietly take things down" and the ongoing, perpetual threat of Chinese censorship.
This fairly robust mea culpa satisfies Robby Soave, and that's good enough for me. We'll take it. A little bit of head-in-hands reflection, coupled with substantial policy change, is better than what we can expect from, say, our news media. These changes will make Meta a better platform that's less oriented toward paternalism and top-down control. They'll also just happen to have the effect of possibly making it once again more competitive with X.
Gulf of AMERICA: Trump, never a man to be hemmed in by norms let alone international law, has declared recently that he's interested in buying Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and possibly getting the Panama Canal back under American control.
Speaking for about an hour at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, Trump outlined some of his latest ambitions, which have been greeted with apoplectic headlines from mainstream outlets.
Here's a transcript of his comments, and here are some excerpts:
The Panama Canal is a disgrace, what took place at the Panama Canal. Jimmy Carter gave it to them for $1 and they were supposed to treat us well. I thought it was a terrible thing to do. It was the most expensive structure ever built in the history of our country, relatively.…We gave it away for a dollar, but the deal was that they have to treat us fairly. They don't treat us fairly. They charge more for our ships than they charge for ships of other countries. They charge more for our navy than they charge for navies of other countries. They laugh at us because they think we're stupid, but we're not stupid anymore. So the Panama Canal is under discussion with them right now. They violated every aspect of the agreement and they've morally violated it also. And they want our help because it's leaking and not in good repair and they want us to give $3 billion to help fix it. I said, well, why don't you get the money from China, because China is basically taking it over.
And later:
We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring. That covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name and it's appropriate. It's appropriate.
Also:
We're going to put very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada because Canada, they come through Canada too, and the drugs that are coming through are at record numbers, record numbers. So we're going to make up for that by putting tariffs on Mexico and Canada, substantial tariffs. And we want to get along with everybody, but it takes two to tango.
He has, in the last few days, talked about how he'd like to acquire Greenland, where his son is currently doing photo ops. The island, currently under Danish control, has been mulling independence from the Danes (those dirty colonists!), but Prime Minister Múte Egede has also declared that Greenland is not for sale. ("For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity," Trump said last month when announcing his pick for U.S. ambassador to Denmark.)
"Let's start if we could with your references to Greenland and the Panama Canal and so forth," asked a journalist yesterday. "Can you assure the world that, as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?"
"No," Trump answered flatly.
As usual, it's not totally clear what his thinking is, or what his approach will be. It would have been better to categorically deny the possibility of using military force, sure. But I think it's too early to act like "TRUMP PURSUES IMPERIALISM" is the headline here.
A 1951 treaty gives America control over Greenland's defense. It's interesting and fair to mull whether such commitments should be rolled back, made more forceful, or changed. I don't think troops will be marching into the Arctic anytime soon, nor taking the Panama Canal. Like much of what Trump says, he may, in fact, be anchoring—starting with the craziest possible version, far from what he hopes to achieve, knowing it will need to be pared back—and laying out his starting position for negotiations, knowing he will end up with something much more mild (lesser fees for American ships going through the Panama Canal, for example). Maybe I'm giving him too much benefit of the doubt; unlike much of the news media, I have linked to a full transcript of his comments so that you, reader, can judge what you think of the remarks. Judge for yourself!
Interesting that the concept of growth via land acquisition ("let's buy Greenland! and merge with Canada!") and the concept of growth via population acquisition ("more immigrants is good!") have very, VERY different political vibes and valences right now
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) January 7, 2025
Southern California's terrifying situation: Multiple wildfires have started in Southern California, engulfing Pacific Palisades and other areas of the coast, with authorities sending out evacuation orders to over 30,000 people. From Malibu to Santa Monica, many people have fled, seemingly in time: No casualties have been reported yet (thankfully). The fire has consumed over 3,000 acres there so far.
East of Los Angeles, near Pasadena, another fire has consumed over 1,000 acres so far, in Eaton Canyon. A third fire has started in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley.
The Santa Ana winds, with gusts of 99 mph recorded last night, are exacerbating the wildfires. They're expected to calm a bit over the course of this morning but still present a massive threat as the fires have not been gotten under control yet.
"Nearly 300,000 customers across the Los Angeles area were without power early Wednesday, either because of powerful winds or because a utility provider had turned off their electricity to prevent fires," reports The New York Times.
View from the sky above LA.
Pacific Palisades and Malibu engulfed in flames. Absolutely Horrific. pic.twitter.com/Q5O8XgEHng— Dan Hellie (@DanHellie) January 8, 2025
Scenes from New York: "Congestion pricing has totally worked," declare X users, three days in, using one single point-in-time screenshot.
QUICK HITS
- "Shares in firms exposed to wind energy including Orsted A/S, Siemens Energy AG and Vestas Wind Systems A/S all fell more than 6% on Wednesday after the US president-elect said he would seek to have no wind farms constructed during his second term," reports Bloomberg.
- "For the first time a majority of Canadians, who have long been welcoming to newcomers, are questioning how their cities can manage," writes Celia Hatton for the BBC. "Politics in other Western countries has long been wrapped up in polarised debates surrounding immigration but until recently Canada had mostly avoided that issue, perhaps because of its geography. Now, however, there appears to be a profound shift in attitude. In 2022, 27% of Canadians said there were too many immigrants coming into the country, according to a survey by data and research firm Environics. By 2024, that number had increased to 58%." Canada, Hatton notes, has let in more than 5 million immigrants over the last decade, raising the country's population from 35 million to about 40 million, with 90 percent of that growth coming from immigration.
- The deep dive you didn't know you needed…into Chick-fil-A's lemonade robots
- Unfortunately, I totally relate. I think this makes me a certified Bad Libertarian:
The anti-paternalism leaving my body whenever I read something about online sports betting pic.twitter.com/1079gKYFAA
— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) January 6, 2025
