3 Things - 13 January

Welcome to 3 Things for 13 January, taking a look at a few big news, media and tech stories that have caught my eye in the past week.

1. Meta ?? free speech

The biggest story by far in the past week has been Meta’s decision - delivered by Mark Zuckerberg in a video - to get rid of an army of content moderators who for years have been policing content on Facebook and Instagram, checking for hate speech, misinformation and other unsavoury stuff.

Zuckerberg said the fact-checkers had been “too politically biased” and had “shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far”. Inevitably the move has been met with approval from Donald Trump supporters who think their posts have been over-zealously removed in the past, and disdain from liberals who reckon Zuckerberg is aiming to curry favour with the president-elect and close confidant Elon Musk.

I think it’s difficult to add much to the debate that’s raged since the video dropped last Tuesday but I’ve got two main observations. First, that Zuckerberg is being the arch-pragmatist. In claiming to be “getting back to our roots” on free speech, he’s reversing a narrative into a business imperative, which is kissing the ring of Trump, who’s previously threatened to jail him for life. Given Zuckerberg’s main responsibility is managing a $1.5 trillion business and generating returns for demanding shareholders, I wonder why people are so surprised at the move.

Second, Zuckerberg is also playing mainly to a home audience in the US. Powerful as the tech giants are, they still have to follow the rules (or at least claim to follow the rules) of the countries they operate in. In the UK, science secretary Peter Kyle, in charge of overseeing the Online Safety Act, is talking a good game. “There is one thing that has not changed and that is the law of this land,” he said over the weekend. “If you come and operate in this country you abide by the law, and the law says illegal content must be taken down.”

2. Less social, more AI for media brands

Of course, one question about Meta’s move is how it might affect the way media brands interact with its platforms. That question was answered in part by the new Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2025 report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism , even though the fieldwork was conducted before Zuckerberg’s announcement.

For years social media platforms helped drive traffic to news websites. More recently, though, they’ve become the figurative unreliable boyfriends, for two reasons. First, platforms’ constant tweaks to algorithms and downweighting of news content has hit traffic. And second, brands have been scared off some platforms - most notably Elon Musk’s X - because of extreme content. Facebook and Instagram are now likely to look more X-y. According to the Reuters Institute report, which surveyed 326 newsroom bosses in 51 countries, leaders plan to put less effort into X, Facebook and Snapchat this year.

At the same time, most plan to spend more time engaging with AI platforms, particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity. Media companies have been struggling to know how to approach AI’s recycling of their content for a while. I think they need to stand firm and demand that the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic - which are bankrolled by tech giants rolling in cash - pay properly for the information training their models.

There’s tons more in the report. If you work in comms or media, I suggest reading at least the exec summary for the headlines.

3. Morgan off on his own

Finally, as first reported by Sky News’s Mark Kleinman, Piers Morgan is taking his Uncensored brand away from News UK, the British arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, and folding it into his own production company. Morgan launched Uncensored on Talk TV in the UK in 2022 before moving it to YouTube in 2024. There, it has 3.6m subscribers. He also posts clips from his shows across other social channels.

Funnily enough, the Reuters Institute report references the increasing influence of “partisan personalities and creators that often operate outside journalistic norms, and some say have now eclipsed the mainstream media in terms of both influence and trust”. Morgan personifies this trend.

It’s really no surprise to see him go solo with Uncensored as it probably suits both parties. Morgan will have greater licence to say what he wants (always good for someone who has an opinion on literally everything), while Murdoch’s company gets Morgan’s colossal contract - said to have been in the region of ￡50m over three years - off the payroll. Everybody wins.

Thanks for reading 3 Things. See you next time.