Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.”
In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking his new curly hairdo and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale parroted talking points that right-wing legislators, pundits, and Trump himself have been hammering for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t coy about the timing, explicitly saying the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he said in the video.
In Zuckerberg’s telling, the main impetus for the change is the desire to boost “free expression.” Meta’s social networks had become too extreme in restricting the speech of users, he said, so the thrust of the changes—which included ending Meta’s multiyear partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations and retreating from efforts to diminish the spread of hate speech—is to let freedom ring, even if it means “we’re gonna catch less bad stuff.”
But the tell is in Zuckerberg’s nomenclature. He described his company’s (not completely successful) efforts to avoid promoting toxic content as “censorship.” He has now adopted the same bad-faith characterizations of his employees’ work that the political right did, which used it as a bludgeon to force Facebook to allow ultraconservatives to promote things like targeted harassment and intentional misinformation. In reality, Meta has every right to police its content in the way that it wants—“censorship” is something governments do, and private companies are simply exercising their own free speech rights by deciding what content is appropriate for their users and advertisers.
Zuckerberg first indicated that he might be OK with the term in a simpering letter he wrote last August to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying that the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The content remained, which actually illustrates that Facebook is granted the power to shape free expression in the US, not the government.) But in his Instagram post yesterday, Zuckerberg bear-hugged the term, using it as a synonym for the entire practice of content moderation itself. “We’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he promised. An alternate reading might be—we’re letting the dobermans out!
In the same letter to Jordan, the former left-leaning CEO took a vow that he would no longer side with either political party. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role,” he wrote. Now that Trump is elected, that’s all out the window. “It feels like we’re in a new era now,” he said in yesterday’s video. Apparently, it’s an era where private companies change their rules to ensure they’re in sync with the party in power. In the last week alone, Zuckerberg replaced the departing Nick Clegg, the company’s former president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, a former GOP operative and clerk to the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once urged Facebook to ignore misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg also tapped Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, an ardent Trump supporter, to sit on Meta’s board.
Another indication that there’s a MAGA element to these changes is Zuckerberg’s announcement that he’s moving Meta’s trust and safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas. Once again, he said out loud that the reasons for the geographical move were political: “I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Hello, Mark? This move simply anchors Meta’s content arbiters in a location with a potentially different bias. It’s also a conspicuous statement that Zuckerberg himself might consider California—Trump’s kryptonite—as a less savory place to work than deep-red Texas.
