🎧 DEI: The Season Finale

Hey there readers and listeners,

Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to Meta’s content policies and also made internal changes to their DEI teams — in that they completely got rid of them.

Make no mistake: despite their ‘free speech’ claims, the content moderation will continue. They will still take down pro-Palestinian speech, they will still leave up hate speech.

But in a complete reversal of some core content moderation policies — such as whether it's acceptable to label a gay person as mentally ill — they’ll now stop 'censoring' harmful individuals. In other words, they will stop implementing a half-hearted set of content moderation policies designed to sometimes protect the marginalised.

They also will stop pretending to take responsibility for creating a safe space. On top of their content moderation revamp, they summarily fired their DEI teams. This preceded a wave of companies falling in line, and saying that they were done with DEI too.

What does content moderation have to do with DEI policies? Turns out, a lot. And what do DEI policies have to do with the rise of the right? Hey, you guessed it, a lot!

It seems clear that DEI work has been a mixed bag since the murder of George Floyd; more light than heat. But what we’re seeing now — this targeted, extreme backlash — is an important political strategy.

This entanglement between technology platforms, content moderation, DEI, and the last few weeks of tech oligarchy and fascism fusing into a ball of authoritarian control is also A LOT.

Luckily, we have a podcast where we can work through these tough questions with some of the smartest people on the issue. This month, we spoke with our favourite DEI experts, Hanna Mccloskey and Rubie Clarke of Fearless Futures.

They help us dig into what DEI is, what it isn’t, and what the current moment might portend for platform politics and the tactics that might be successful in the fight against systemic racism. It was such a rich set of conversations — we sat down for almost 3 hours!

This Friday, we will be releasing a third episode on the tech industry DEI backlash, and some insight into what it was like running a DEI consultancy following the murder of George Floyd.

As usual, thank you for listening and reading — you can always respond directly to these emails with any thoughts or feedback or just email the podcast team at pod@saysmaybe.com.

Alix & the pod team (Sarah, Georgia, and Prathm)

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