Mark Zuckerberg’s alliance with Donald Trump proves just how low he’ll go

This week’s changes at the world’s biggest social media company has been a clear mask-off moment.

Not for Mark Zuckerberg, mind you. If you've followed him as long as I have, you'll know that when the boss of Facebook and Instagram takes off one mask, there's invariably another waiting underneath.

But for the apps' parent company Meta, Zuckerberg's new Donald Trump-friendly reforms expose the emptiness of all the solemn pledges and apologies it made during its past eight years of claiming to care about misinformation and bigotry.

In a video posted on Tuesday, the 40-year-old CEO said he wanted to "get back to our roots about free expression" and "work with President Trump" to fight censorship around the world. "The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point," he said, in case you were wondering why he'd do this now.

The most consequential change is that Meta will "dial back" the sensitivity of its content moderation AI, instructing it to err on the side of catching too little rather than censoring too much. The most eye-catching is the cancellation Meta's fact-checking program, in which the company sent disputed articles to independent journalists then choked off traffic to articles rated false.

Meta has also loosened its hate speech rules, adding new exceptions for anti-trans content. The company will stop throttling political content on its services, and move its trust and safety team from woke, biased California to unbiased, apolitical Texas.

Meanwhile, the company appointed Ultimate Fighting Championship president and Trump ally Dana White to its board of directors, as well as donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta's long-serving head of global affairs Nick Clegg — a centrist who once ran the UK’s minority liberal party — has resigned, to be replaced by veteran Republican operative Joel Kaplan.

“[Kaplan] is quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time!" said Clegg on Threads.

Meta’s choice of media outlet to announce its “free expression” overhaul was also telling: an exclusive interview with Kaplan on Fox & Friends. “Over the last four years, we saw a lot of societal and political pressure in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship. And we've got a real opportunity now,” he told the right-wing cable show. “We've got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”

This is largely sanctimonious, of course. Regulating speech is at the core of Meta’s business model, which depends on algorithmically boosting and suppressing different kinds of content to keep users hooked. These automated systems routinely promote harmful or controversial material, which naturally provokes calls for more censorship from politicians and the public. A true commitment to free expression would require much deeper (and more expensive) reforms.

But what is happening is a nakedly partisan bit of pandering to America’s flagrantly anti-free-speech future president. It is also a surrender to the pro-MAGA fake news industry that propelled Trump to power — what I like to call the bulls***-industrial complex.

While there’s no shortage of misinformation on the left, years of research and reporting indicate that these changes will benefit conservatives most of all. Zuckerberg’s analysts will surely have told him this, assuming they’re still allowed to say such things. Either he doesn’t care or that’s the goal.

Just look at how Zuckerberg talked about his fact checkers on their way out. “We tried in good faith to address concerns [about misinformation] without becoming arbiters of truth,” he said. “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

Fact checkers strongly dispute these claims, and Zuck cited no evidence for them. Yet even putting that debate aside, he’s rewriting history here. From 2004 to 2016, Facebook expanded relentlessly into a near regulatory vacuum, swallowing swathes of the open web and making itself the gatekeeper between news outlets and their audiences.

Then, starting in late 2016, the world woke up to how pervasive Facebook’s power had become. Its algorithms not only boosted fake news in the US but enabled a genocide in Myanmar. In response, Facebook asked traditional news outlets to help it mitigate its own business practices by fact-checking content that spread on its platforms.

This wasn’t some straitjacket foisted on Facebook by regulators. The program was an unequal “partnership” in which Facebook always held the reins. As well as binding fact checkers to secrecy, it set the terms of the agreement, decided what content would be available for fact-checking, and decided how to act on the fact-checkers’ judgements.

Some checkers complained that Facebook was simply using them for “crisis PR”, suborning their expertise to insulate itself from criticism. Others felt that Facebook’s size and influence over their distribution channels made participation “non-optional”. And eventually Zuckerberg seemed to view these “partners” as no longer a shield but a burden.

There was similar criticism about every part of Meta’s operations. For all its flashy new initiatives meant to combat disinformation, the company always seemed to drag its feet. As a tech journalist covering the company, I found there was some kind of small print or asterisk on almost everything they did.

If Zuckerberg now thinks even these qualified actions were a surrender to the woke mob, he’s only got himself to blame. He remains the undisputed king of Meta, having taken total control of the company in 2012. Apparently he now feels piqued that his efforts did not win him lasting goodwill. But it’s hard to build trust while continually refusing to relinquish any power, either on a personal or a corporate level.

Zuck seems to believe that an enthusiastic alliance with Trump is his best path forward. His video on Tuesday also sparked disagreements with the European Union, bracketing its new content regulation laws alongside China’s vast digital censorship machine as threats that he intended to fight.

My friend James Ball, a British journalist and expert on Big Tech power, described this act of obeisance as “digital feudalism”. I’d suggest there’s another, more contemporary political term beginning with F that might fairly be applied to a union of big business with bellicose authoritarian nationalism.

Either way, the risks are severe. “I really think this is a precursor for genocide,” one former employee told the tech newsletter Platformer, referring to weakening of moderation. “We’ve seen it happen. Real people’s lives are actually going to be endangered. I’m just devastated.”

So does this mean Mark Zuckerberg was really a crypto-Trumpist all along? I highly doubt it. People close to Zuckerberg have described him as a “natural libertarian”, and former Facebookers say there is sincerity in his recent political turn. But the record suggests Zuck has always said and done what he thinks is best for Meta, and this week is no different.

All of which is a vindication for those who have spent the last decade arguing that Meta never truly cared about its civic responsibilities, and that all of its efforts were merely the minimum its executives felt it could get away with.

In the end it was Trump himself, in one of his occasional moments of total lucidity, who offered the most succinct summary of the situation.

“Do you think [Zuckerberg]’s directly responding to the threats you’ve made to him in the past?” asked a journalist — referring to that time when Trump threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life.

“Probably,” answered Trump. “Yeah, probably.”