The Billionaires Compete for Dear Leader’s Favor
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters. Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting conservative opinions.
The recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement, justifying relaxed new content moderation rules on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said, repeating a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact checking.
Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, with billions of users on its platforms worldwide, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways
I can’t understand what these billionaires think they’ll accomplish with this destruction but it appears to me that they are just playing schoolyard games with each other, currying favor with Trump and trying to outcompete each other.
They even announced it on Fox and Friends:
Tuesday morning’s announcements seemed like they were addressed directly to Trump, especially since Meta first gave the news exclusively to “Fox & Friends,” one of the president-elect’s favorite TV shows.
The company’s newly promoted policy chief Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sat with the Fox co-hosts and fully agreed with the show’s “censorship” versus “freedom” framing. Kaplan’s appearance was the latest sign of Meta recalibrating in advance of Trump’s second term in office.
Trump and some key allies have been harshly critical of Zuckerberg and Facebook in the past. Trump once accused Zuckerberg of election interference and threatened to send him to prison for “the rest of his life.”
They all have business with the government and are also terrified of Trump and his henchmen.
This is the Orban/Putin model. I just can’t believe how obvious they’re being about it. But why not? If Trump has proved anything it’s that there are no consequences for total shamelessness. Who cares?
I gave up Facebook a long time ago and I will give up X too just as soon as Blue sky finally attains the scale I need to do my work (and allows me to embed and play videos on to the site.) Social media is about to make a major leap into the abyss and I’m not sure what happens now.