It’s difficult to say who’s winning the race for President-elect Donald Trump’s grace, but the competition is fierce, and the number of competitors grows exponentially, day after day.
While Elon Musk had the pole position, other competitors are also catching up, all hoping that their companies will benefit financially from embracing Trump.
Facebook’s/Meta’s Zuckerberg entered the race belatedly, but he started strong, anyways.
Starting with January 7, Meta announced a series of changes in quick succession.
First came the swift end of content moderation as Zuckerberg eliminated third-party fact-checking on all his platforms in the U.S., also slowing down the processes of taking down potentially damaging content. It will be replaced by ‘community notes’, allowing network users to determine the validity of posts. Or, as Zuckerberg
Meta will also loosen rules on hate speech, while trying to ‘push back’ against Europe and other regulatory bodies that ‘try to censor’ content through their own laws. In addition to this, Meta will terminate its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
And, to sweeten the deal even more, he appointed a close Trump ally Dana White (CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship) to the bord of Meta, along with a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund. Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan was made Meta’s global chief of policy.
The reasons for the U-turn?
CEO Mark Zuckerberg feels that ‘the recent election of Donald Trump was a cultural tipping point’ and ‘fact-checkers have been too politically biased’.
Now, please ignore the fact that for the last decade, he mostly prompted and funded left-leaning issues and, when it was necessary for his business, he simply kicked Trump off Facebook and Instagram. That belongs to the past.
And after many years of leftist ideological overreach, he surely does have a point.
While there are cases, when fact-checking worked, even experts admitted that it wasn’t as effective when an issue was polarized. (That is most of the topics considered worthy of a fact-check. Nobody bothers to investigate funny cat videos.) Also, content from the political right more often got flagged as problematic than misinformation from the left.
Not to mention that fact-checking done for real is a much more complicated, more time-consuming, and costlier process than those organizations made it seem by those surface-level checks.
Not everybody is happy, though.
It’s not just the 90 organizations that worked for Zuckerberg’s platforms, for a hefty sum, of course, to provide those fact-checking services that are worried about these changes that will render Facebook and Co. very similar to Musk’s own X’s.
Neither is it just the vast array of NGO’s and other organizations operating in the field.
Some, like Trump’s former right-hand man and once-trusted co-warrior Steve Bannon, have already warned Trump against trusting the ‘billionaires’, reminding that Zuckerberg put $450 million of his own money to non-profits to ‘steal the 2020 election’. Bannon concluded with, ‘only thing they can be counted on is look after their own self-interest. That’s it.’
While the former Trump aide’s words might be fuelled by his own grievances (he was banned from Facebook permanently, after all) and hurt (after he lost most of his influence on Trump and probably no longer belongs to his inner circles, either), but there is a grain of truth in his advance warning.
Barely had Zuckerberg announced the abrupt policy shifts at Meta, he already laid his list of demands on Trump’s still only virtual presidential table, fuelling fears that his swift shift of alliance has more mundane reasons: with the State Department behind his back, it would be much easier to fight the EU’s ‘ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship’ and the difficulties to ‘build anything innovative there’.
Some social media experts say that it’s not EU regulations that prevent Mr. Zuckerberg from innovating, but his own lack of exciting new ideas.
Facebook’s user numbers are still rising, but growth is just the fraction of what it used to be. After the initial strong start, his much hyped Metaverse is showing signs of being in serious trouble. Reality Labs has lost a measly $21 billion in a year, user numbers are down, reviews are full of complaints.
Neither did the billions he invested into A.I. generated avatars bring the results he dreamed about, in fact Meta had to delete its own accounts after users gave mostly negative feedbacks, for example about the avatars actually lying when in chats with humans.
But again, who cares for those dirty details?
Zuckerberg didn’t only complain about censorship or compared EU’s antitrust penalties to tariffs, but accused Brussels of “screwing with” (Sic) American industry. ‘I think it’s a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world, and I think it should be part of the U.S. strategy going forward to defend that (…) and it’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump’.
Zuckerberg also declared that ‘… we will work with President Trump to resist governments around the world that are persecuting American companies and pushing for more censorship’.
Music to Trump’s ears, no doubt and will probably last as long as Zuckerberg’s interests require.
It is yet to be seen, how the currently ongoing American legal procedures against Mr. Musk or Mr. Zuckerberg will be influenced by the new administration, but it is U.S. domestic affairs, after all.
On the other hand, while there’s nothing wrong with the American government representing the U.S.’s interests abroad, that’s why they get their pay checks after all, there should be clear distinction made between the business interests of a few and those of the country, along with maintaining the respect for other countries’ sovereignty, especially when it comes to close allies.
Even if Zuckerberg is right on Brussels’ penchant for over-regulating things.
Both the United Kingdom and Germany got a sampler of how things play out if the platforms decide to go against their governments, hiding behind Washington’s back. Any country can be the next.
