Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bombshell announcement earlier this week that his company would pivot to a “privacy-focused communications platform” that prioritizes encrypted private messaging and groups over the public-facing posts and the algorithm-driven News Feed.

According to the company’s former security chief, Alex Stamos, the move could mean that some of Facebook’s toughest issues around moderating speech and curbing bad behavior effectively disappear. “Mark Zuckerberg decided he can’t be in the middle anymore. The middle is where you lose continuously,” Stamos told a crowd at Vox Media’s SXSW event series, referring to Facebook’s attempt to straddle a line between strictly controlling speech and behavior on its platform…

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