Last Week Tonight with John Oliver continued on Sunday night, taking a deep dive into one of the biggest stories that broke during the show's hiatus: Facebook's changing policy on content moderation and fact-checking.
In early January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook and Instagram would undergo changes related to content moderation and censorship. Fact-checkers were replaced with community notes and fewer restrictions were placed on content.
John Oliver had a lot of problems with Zuckerberg's video, not the least of which was the CEO's look. The Last Week Tonight host joked Zuckerberg looked like Eddie Redmayne playing Ice Cube or "a high schooler going undercover as a different high schooler with fewer friends." Oliver also took issue with Zuckerberg wearing a $900,000 watch during the video.
But in terms of the actual changes to Facebook, Oliver made it very clear that he viewed the decision as a catastrophic mistake. He noted that anti-immigration rhetoric and various slurs were now approved content.
And when it comes to community notes, Last Week Tonight reminded its audience that X hasn't exactly mastered that system. Oliver pointed to a study which found a majority of community notes related to the 2024 election didn't reach users, and he also revisited the false "immigrants eating cats" story that went viral.
John Oliver calls out Mark Zuckerberg's hypocrisy
John Oliver spent most of the main story in the February 23 episode of Last Week Tonight attacking Mark Zuckerberg. The late-night TV host called out Zuckerberg's tune change from seven years ago.
Oliver played clips of Zuckerberg apologizing during a 2018 appearance in front of Congress for Facebook's role in spreading disinformation and hate speech. But now, Oliver sees a much different Zuckerberg touting a much different policy. The comedian mocked Zuckerberg's attempt to sound like an "everyman" despite being a billionaire.
The segment went on to acknowledge that Facebook was never perfect. Multiple Last Week Tonight episodes have attacked or mocked the social media platform. Oliver outlined the challenges associated with content moderation at the scale of something like Facebook. But that didn't mean Zuckerberg was off the hook.
Oliver predicts that the decision to ban fact-checkers and eliminate the exisiting systems designed to make the platform safer will backfire, and Facebook will become a lot worse. Only time will tell, but it sounds an awful lot like what Oliver said about Twitter, and he wasn't far off.