Jan 10, 2025 · 49m · more-or-less
#81: Meta's Community Notes: More Speech and Fewer Mistakes? · More or Less Podcast
Sam Lessin · 12m spoken Dave Morin · 12m spoken Jessica Lessin · 11m spoken Brit Morin · 7m spoken Podcast Intro Singer · 12s spoken
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the More or Less podcast, hosts Jessica Lessin, Sam Lessin, Dave Morin, and Brit Morin critique Meta's decision to replace centralized content moderation with Community Notes amid Silicon Valley's political shift toward Donald Trump. The panel also evaluates hardware and AI innovations from CES 2025, contrasting enterprise breakthroughs from NVIDIA against the practical realities of consumer robotics and autonomous vehicles.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 3.8 Guest disagreement 4.2 The hosts pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:16 Sam rejects the premise of healthy feeds
Sam bluntly interrupts Dave's thoughtful plea for algorithmic alignment, arguing forcefully that consumers do not want healthy feeds, but rather Doritos and bikini pictures.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 19:31 Jessica dismantles the TikTok negotiation theoryJessica immediately cuts off Dave's speculation, firmly stating that Meta's announcement has nothing to do with TikTok and framing it instead around broad Big Tech alignment with Trump.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 16:39 Dave illustrates early platform scaling through crowdsourcingDave draws on his early engineering days at Facebook to educate the panel on how crowd-sourced wiki translation enabled global scale, providing a technical precedent for community notes.
The host holds their own ▶ 34:15 Jessica details the internal corporate forces driving policy changeJessica draws on her journalistic reporting to demonstrate that post-COVID tech layoffs effectively disempowered vocal internal employee activists who had pushed for speech restrictions.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Preview: Meta Overhauls Content Moderation | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Jessica opens the episode setting up the week's seismic tech news regarding Meta's content moderation shift. Dave and Sam immediately downplay the seismic nature of the tech headlines compared to the LA wildfires, but the exchange remains lighthearted banter. | |
| CES 2025: Attendance and Jensen Huang's Keynote | 5 | 3 | 5 | 4 | Sam aggressively derides CES as a midwit event and mocks people waiting in line for keynotes. Jessica pushes back against the harsh characterization by citing genuine business networking and actual robot demos she has observed. | |
| Autonomous Vehicles and the Evolution of Interfaces | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Jessica shares excitement over spotting a Waymo on Highway 101, prompting Dave to reflect on whether upcoming generations will ever understand steering wheels. The group engages in relaxed generational slang banter. | |
| Meta's Moderation Pivot and Sam's First Principles Critique | 5 | 6 | 6 | 4 | Jessica introduces Meta's moderation pivot and asks Sam for his take. Sam unleashes a passionate critique of centralized fact-checking, declaring it a disastrous, unscalable mistake, while Jessica steps in to delineate fact from opinion. | |
| Political Calculations, Texas Relocation, and AI Moderation Doubts | 5 | 6 | 4 | 3 | Brit questions whether the policy shift would have occurred under a Democratic administration, while Dave offers historical insight into early Facebook moderation and compares community notes to their early user-driven wiki translation tool. | |
| Big Tech's Alignment with Trump and Policy Rollbacks | 7 | 2 | 3 | 6 | Jessica rejects Dave's suggestion that Zuckerberg's pivot relates to TikTok negotiations, demonstrating deep journalistic expertise on tech companies courting the Trump administration and reporting on shifting policies around gender identity moderation. | |
| Risks of Misinformation and the Identity Solution | 6 | 5 | 5 | 6 | Jessica challenges Sam's celebration of deregulation by asking how society handles damaging conspiracy theories. Sam counters by insisting that platform moderation is futile and that verifiable identity is the only viable safeguard. | |
| Feed Algorithms, Algorithmic Alignment, and Reach | 5 | 5 | 6 | 4 | Dave argues that platforms need to invest in healthier feed algorithms, citing Sam Altman's critique of feeds as misaligned AI. Sam combatively dismisses Dave's thesis, arguing that user demand is fundamentally driven by junk content rather than health. | |
| Tech Employee Activism, Layoffs, and the Political Pendulum | 7 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Jessica explains the structural reasons for the moderation shift, tying it to post-COVID layoffs that dismantled internal activist employee blocs and altered the political leverage inside tech campuses. | |
| Passing the Mic: Male Moderation Banter | 5 | 3 | 5 | 6 | When Jessica departs, Sam playfully complains about male hosts never being allowed to moderate. Jessica and Brit quickly shut down his complaint, asserting that the male hosts cannot keep the conversation focused. | |
| NVIDIA Omniverse and Industrial Robotics at CES | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Dave highlights NVIDIA's Mega Omniverse announcement for industrial digital twins, and Sam provides strategic analysis on why a three-trillion-dollar company is pressured to move up the value chain before hardware commoditization sets in. | |
| NVIDIA Digits Desktop Supercomputer and Home AI | 5 | 3 | 4 | 4 | Brit questions the market viability of NVIDIA's Digits desktop supercomputer and later challenges Sam's TV recommendation by arguing Landman merely copies the Yellowstone formula. |
Statements from this episode (20)
Sam Lessin: CES is an extremely midwit event
“To me, CES is an extremely midwit event, right? Like it's just for like the midwits, you know?”
Jessica Lessin: Hyped CES consumer robots can barely walk and aren't ready
“I have gotten demos of these exact robots and they like can barely walk. So I think. The robots aren't here yet.”
Sam Lessin: Consumer robotics lag 20 years behind military-driven innovation
“It's like any war where like wars spur the innovation, and then 20 years later the thing will pick up your socks well, but like right now we're in the C-Four era.”
Sam Lessin: Centralized social network fact-checking is impossible at scale and dangerous
“The idea that a centralized platform, a centralized social network, Would be in the business of fact checking was always one of the most dangerous and worst ideas imaginable. And I was very unhappy when the company went in that direction over time because it's…”
Lessin: Feed moderation pushes bad behavior into dangerous private messaging
“Most of the action is in private messaging, which is broadly not content moderated broadly, and we can get into the details there. And by moderating feeds and not moderating messaging, which is where the action is because you can see the feed. So people see th…”
Lessin: Meta's rollback of content moderation is fundamentally the right decision
“I actually think from a first principles perspective, this is the right thing to do, and it has been for a long time. It was a mistake to go down moderation in the first place. And this is an incredibly opportunistic moment where, oh my God, it's actually poss…”
Sam Lessin: Meta moderation overhaul would not happen under Harris
“No, because you wouldn't have had the opening to it, but it's not, that, that, a hundred percent not, right?”
Brit Morin: Meta community moderation is unlikely to work well
“Like I just find it implausible that this is going to work well. And I know that, you know, even if one percent of content gets falsely moderated by all these systems that were set up, I'm not sure that the community moderation is going to prove to be much bet…”
Dave Morin: Zuckerberg's moderation shift returns to early Facebook values
“I think Mark's taking the opportunity here to return to his original values to some extent.”
Morin: Mark Zuckerberg is surprisingly on 'bended knee' politically
“Politically, I'm very surprised to find Mark on bended knee at this moment.”
Dave Morin: Zuckerberg has global influence rivaling the US President
“I think that he's a leader on a global scale, almost on the scale of the American president.”
Lessin: Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Musk are aligning with Trump
“Clearly Meta and Amazon and Apple, to a lesser degree, Google, Definitely Empire Elon are all quite in alignment with Trump, right? And I think, like, have decided to really, like, lean in in every way to this administration from, like, you know, the money the…”
Lessin: Meta rolling back moderation is a 'costless' political concession
“Do you throw Trump and Elon a bone? Like it's kind of costless to do so. So why not?”
Lessin: Unmoderated platforms make real identity and trust networks the only solution
“If you don't moderate, you put more and more pressure on having real identity in a way that can be like, oh, that's this person. And like, I trust this person. Networks of trust. Like, that's the only solution.”
Morin: Algorithmic feeds are the first at-scale misaligned AIs
“Algorithmic feeds are the first at scale misaligned AIs. And like, I couldn't agree more, right? Like we still haven't really figured out how to align a feed with true health for people.”
Sam Lessin: AI feeds align with what users actually want, not what they claim
“I actually think AI is incredibly aligned with what people actually want, not what they say they want.”
Morin: Elon Musk bought $40 billion in 'house ads' to buy America
“He bought forty billion in house ads for himself so he could buy America.”
Jessica Lessin: Musk's 70% Twitter cuts spurred broader tech industry layoffs
“The kind of aggressive layoffs post COVID, which by the way, we're also spurred by Elon when Elon fired. 70%, right? Firing 20 or 30 or 10 didn't look so bad.”
Lessin: Silicon Valley's rightward political shift will trigger an extreme backlash
“My big concern is that we're in, like, an escalating pendulum situation, where, like, we swung further right. Next, we're gonna, like, go crazy later. It says, like, Bitcoin cryptic right now, like, wait till someone comes in who's angry, right? Like, that's h…”