If Whoopi Goldberg goes to visit Mar-a-Lago I'm going to throw up.
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta go all-in on Trump
The Facebook parent company was strikingly public about currying favor with Trump in changing its content moderation policies
By William Gavin, Quartz Media
Publishedan hour ago
Mark Zuckerberg’s metamorphosis from liberal tech titan to libertarian Donald Trump ally is gaining steam.
Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a series of major changes to Meta’s content moderation practices that resembled those of Elon Musk’s X, mirroring his rival’s free-wheeling, hands-off approach to information on digital platforms. Instead of employing dozens of third-party fact-checkers to keep misinformation in check, Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will rely on crowd-sourced contributions from active users.
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Content moderation policies surrounding immigration and gender — both issues that were widely seen as contributing to the GOP’s electoral sweep in November — will be simplified. Political posts will be amplified. Meta’s trust and safety team will be moved from liberal California to conservative Texas to address bias concerns, Zuckerberg said in a video posted by Meta.
Meta’s current system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he added, criticizing the “legacy media” and accusing Meta’s partners of political bias.
The company even dispatched its incoming chief lobbyist to Fox and Friends , one of the president-elect’s favorite TV shows, to tout the changes. During a news conference later on Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he watched the Fox appearance by Joel Kaplan, a former official under President George W. Bush.
Just five years ago, when Meta was still called Facebook and said it was focused on making social media healthier and safer, Tuesday’s changes would have been “almost unthinkable,” said Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University.
“This is not just an overnight thing,” said Lalka, the author of The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power.
“This is Zuckerberg having to make a huge change,” Lalka said.
In 2016, Meta’s failure to curb misinformation and disinformation made Facebook the platform of choice for Russians looking to sow chaos in American elections. Later, false accusations that Zuckerberg had meddled in the 2020 election — often citing his family’s donations to local election offices — became a tool in Republican J.D. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and a talking point for right-wing pundits. (Vance is now vice president-elect.)
Zuckerberg’s donations — which Republicans labeled as “Zuckerbucks” — funded the mundane work of local elections officials at the height of pandemic disruptions. But Republicans in Congress proposed legislation directly targeted at the CEO, and more than two dozen states effectively banned similar donations.
That blowback and more — including a confrontation with a staffer following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in 2020 — helped push Zuckerberg away from his left-leaning political activities, The New York Times reported last September. In 2022, Meta implemented new company policies on raising issues such as abortion access in the workplace. And Zuckerberg hired a Republican strategist to repair his relationships with Trump-friendly officials.
Much of the political shift has taken place behind closed doors. But it was striking Tuesday how public Meta was in currying favor with Trump in its latest changes: Zuckerberg cited the rival social network owned by the Trump-friendly Musk as a model and sent his incoming policy lieutenant to talk up the changes on Fox News.
Trump had previously threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison” if he plotted against him in the 2024 election. On Tuesday, when asked by a reporter if Zuckerberg’s actions might be linked to those threats, Trump replied, “Probably. Yeah. Probably.”
Zuckerberg spoke with Trump at least twice last summer, according to The Times. After an assassination attempt against Trump in July, Zuckerberg publicly called Trump “badass.” In August, he said he regretted not pushing back against calls from federal officials to remove posts about COVID-19 from Facebook and Instagram in 2021.
“We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” Zuckerberg said on Threads after Trump won the election in November. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Just before Thanksgiving, Zuckerberg flew to meet Trump at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. The following week, Meta’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, told reporters that Zuckerberg wants to play an active role in Trump’s technology policy. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.
Those moves amounted to the company giving out a relatively small chunk of change and some friendly words and intentions from Zuckerberg.
Then came January.
Now Clegg, a former U.K. deputy prime minister in the British Liberal Democrats party, is set to be replaced by Kaplan, the former Bush official, in the coming months. On Monday, Meta added Dana White, the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship (EDR
-1.27%
) and a staunch Trump ally, to its board of directors. (Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen already sits on Meta’s board and has been heavily involved in Trump’s transition.)
Then on Tuesday, as Zuckerberg announced Meta’s plan to change its approach to content moderation, he slammed government overreach and criticized President Joe Biden’s administration, Chinese censorship, European regulators, and Latin American “secret courts” that target U.S. companies. The latter was a clear reference to Brazil’s crackdown on Elon Musk’s X last year.
“This will have far-reaching effects,” Lalka said of Zuckerberg’s new approach. “We can’t guess what they will be, necessarily, but it will definitely have far-reaching effects. And we can point to this moment as a significant shift.”
The response to Meta’s changes was predictably mixed.
Brendan Carr, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission and Trump’s pick to chair the panel, called it a “good step in the right direction.” Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino hailed it as a “smart move” — and a sign of X’s power. David Sacks, Trump’s pick for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, thanked Trump and Musk for setting the stage for Meta’s moves.
Meta’s Oversight Board, which reviews some content decisions, said it welcomed crowd-sourced fact-checking.
But a third-party accountability group, which calls itself the “Real Facebook Oversight Board,” said Meta has gone “full MAGA” and was “retooling to allow the Trump administration’s propaganda and obfuscations to flow unchecked.” The group’s members include academics, lawyers, and civil rights advocates, including early Facebook investor Roger McNamee.
Yotam Ophir, a communications professor at the University at Buffalo, said Facebook is likely to have issues similar to those that are rife on X, which he said has been transformed into a “toxic” platform that allows extremism and conspiracy theories to run rampant.
“This seems like a really dangerous and unfortunate attempt by Zuckerberg and Meta to prepare for a second Trump administration, avoid conflicts with Donald Trump and his supporters,” and to avoid fines from regulators, Ophir said.
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