Why Meta is trading transphobia for a new trade war

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re diving into an especially messy set of ideas. It’s been a chaotic couple of weeks for big tech companies as the second Trump administration kicks off an unprecedented era of how we think about who controls the internet. Meta’s changed its rules to openly allow more slurs and hate speech on its platforms, TikTok was banned and sort of unbanned, and a bunch of tech CEOs attended the second Trump inauguration. 

There’s a major collision, or maybe merger, happening right now between billionaire power and state power and everyone who uses tech to communicate — so, basically everyone — meaning everyone is also kind of stuck in the middle.

I invited Kate Klonick, a lawyer as well as an associate professor at St. John’s University School of Law, to try and help me work through the different ways the Trump administration is handling companies like Meta and TikTok — and the very concept of free speech online. As you might have guessed, there are a lot of inconsistencies. But the one thing that unites all of this mess is just how big these companies are and how they’ve drafted the Trump administration into some big geopolitical battles.

Kate just returned to the US after more than a year in Europe studying how those countries are thinking about the internet, and she’s got a lot of thoughts about how these geopolitical conflicts are shaping the present and future of online speech and the internet itself. And these fights are having a real impact on how regular people experience these platforms.

Just a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg made a big announcement about shifting content moderation on Meta platforms — he’s getting rid of fact-checking in favor of crowdsourced community notes, and his new terms of service allow a whole lot of bigoted and transphobic content that used to be at least nominally against the rules. 

You can read this as a MAGA heel turn from Zuck, and certainly his new haircut suggests a man approaching middle age grasping to reclaim the confidence of youth. But these moves are also international in scope: the EU’s Digital Services Act imposes some potentially very heavy and expensive regulations on social media platforms, and if Trump likes Zuckerberg and Facebook enough, maybe he’ll go fight Europe on Meta’s behalf.

We don’t need to guess at this — this is very much what Zuckerberg himself is saying he wants out of Trump. Pretty bluntly, Zuckerberg is trading transphobia for a new kind of trade war.

This kind of wheeling and dealing is going to define how tech companies handle Trump 2.0 — here at The Verge, we’re calling it gangster tech regulation, and there’s a lot to unpack. There’s also, bluntly, the Trumpiness of it all — a theory of power that is entirely focused on outcomes and doesn’t pay any attention to the legitimacy or fairness of the process that arrives at those outcomes, which creates huge opportunities for open corruption and, well, dictator shit.

That’s what we’ve seen this week with the TikTok ban, which is another victim of the geopolitical war for control of speech on the internet. Congress passed a law that banned TikTok unless the app was divested of Chinese control, but Trump has simply decided to ignore that law for political gain, even though ignoring the law carries such huge penalties that Apple and Google aren’t taking the risk of having TikTok back on their app stores.

Now, Trump is saying he’ll force a sale and that he wants the US government to own 50 percent of TikTok, an idea so problematic that Kate and I found it hard to even list all the First Amendment issues it would cause. 

If you’d like to read more about the stories and topics we discussed in this episode, check out the links below:

• Welcome to the era of gangster tech regulation | The Verge
• Trump signs order refusing to enforce TikTok ban for 75 days | The Verge
• Inside Zuckerberg’s sprint to remake Meta for the Trump era | The New York Times
• The internet’s future is looking bleaker by the day | Wired
• Meta is highlighting a splintering global approach to online speech | The Verge
• Mark Zuckerberg lies about content moderation to Joe Rogan’s face | The Verge
• Meta’s ‘tipping point’ is about aligning with power | The Washington Post
• Meta is preparing for an autocratic future | Tech Policy Press
• Meta surrenders to the right on speech | Platformer
• We’re all trying to find the guy who did this | The Atlantic