Zuck goes Musk

The Social Network is broken

Musk has been dominating the airwaves in Britain *this whole year* but we already knew he was a menace. More significant are the moves we’re seeing in Silicon Valley more generally, across a series of social media and tech firms, which are firmly putting on their MAGA caps. Not only have CEOs, billionaires and owners been decamping to Florida and paying homage to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, though there’s been plenty of that. More importantly they’ve been indicating that they intend to tilt their businesses to a more conservative orientation.

In that vein, the announcement made by Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg this morning on Fox & Friends (yes, Fox & Friends) was a real moment. In it the Facebook founder said:

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression”- Mark Zuckerberg, 7th January 2025

This wasn’t just rhetoric, Zuckerberg had a series of policy changes to make to go with it, which included:

• Replacing fact-checkers with X-style community notes.

• “Simplifying our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

• "Remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes."

• “Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas.”

• “Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more."

In other words Facebook, Instagram, Threads and the rest are about to look and sound a lot more like the Musk-era Twitter than how they’ve felt in the last few years. The timing is darkly ironic: it was only four years ago that Zuckerberg and Meta took the decision to ban Trump from all of their social media platforms, following Trump’s repeated use of those same platforms to tell lies about the 2020 election. Now, not only have they welcomed him back but they will be pushing the editorial and ideological bent of the platforms in his direction. There can be no surprise that these announcements have come mere days after Nick Clegg, who until this last week was Meta’s Vice President for Global Affairs, left the company. Joel Kaplan, Clegg’s Republican successor, said in a statement that the company wanted to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.” There will no longer be fact-checking on any of the platforms, Kaplan says, because there’s been “too much political bias” in the fact-checking programme. Facts are biased, apparently.

It’s clear then that the internet and social media is heading into an even more Hobbesian digital state of nature, where there is even less editorial or misinformation control than there was before (and there wasn’t much before). This represents the fusion of American conservatism and increasingly large swathes of Silicon Valley, an alliance which until recently would have seemed improbable. As an illustration of how seriously SV is looking to find favour with the incoming Trump administration, consider the donations made by the biggest SV investors/companies in both the Biden and Trump inaugural committees.

Biden 2021

Meta = $0

Tim Cook = $0

Sam Altman = $0

Google = $200,000

Amazon = $200,000

Trump 2025

Meta = $1,000,000

Tim Cook = $1,000,000

Sam Altman = $1,000,000

Google = $1,000,000

Amazon = $1,000,000

It all makes the regulatory questions surrounding social media even more acute than they’ve seemed in these last few days. It likely sets Meta up for a regulatory battle with the EU, and they’ve already had quite a few of those. Threads, for example launched five months after it did in the US and UK following regulatory problems. Established media organisations will also have to further consider how to respond in their use of the platforms. Although X gets a lot of attention, given historically most journalists and political players have used/been glued/spent their days on it, Facebook is a far more significant news medium. It seems it’s going to become an even less reliable source of information than before. There are security implications too: this will make it even easier for hostile actors, including the Kremlin, to flood Western information feeds with lies which seek to promote their own purposes and propaganda. If recent history is anything to go by they’ll find plenty of our own home-grown stooges to lap it all up.

Keir Starmer and his government want to ignore the oligarch robber barons of Silicon Valley as much as they can. But these moves make that prospect more remote. The UK and EU are going to have to decide whether we want our online spaces (which are increasingly more or less synonymous with much of our democratic space) to be entirely determined not just by the highly ideological mores of Silicon Valley, but a Maga-Silicon Valley fused techno-political project, with a very particular dogmatic free speech ideology at its centre. And even if there is the political will, with the Trump administration firmly on side and an alliance between the centres of American political and economic/technological power, there is the more disturbing question as to whether there is enough residual remaining power and means in Europe, to do anything about it.

P.S. Today’s News Agents featured an extraordinary interview. Andrew Norfolk broke the grooming gang story for The Times, 15 years ago. His exclusive interview on today’s show is deeply powerful, not least for his anger about those political figures now exploiting it and the victims for their own purposes. Please do give it a listen.