| It's a new era for content moderation at Facebook and Instagram. Businessweek senior reporter Max Chafkin explains how the changes are, and are not, a surprise. Plus: Are nonalcoholic drinks a good product for recovering addicts? If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. One of the things that makes Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg something of a comic figure in the tech world is that there's no one in Silicon Valley—and maybe no other domain, save Hollywood—who's as invested in conveying authenticity while also being so nakedly inauthentic. Zuckerberg is an Instagram hashtag come to life–an uber-nerd in the middle of an alpha rebrand, who somehow can't help but come off as hopelessly, incurably beta. In his announcement on Tuesday about a set of changes at Facebook and Instagram, he managed to simultaneously kowtow to a onetime political adversary while explicitly aping the actions of an entrepreneur who's spent a good part of the past two years threatening to beat him up. The changes—which include getting rid of professional fact-checkers and eliminating restrictions on language that Facebook once defined as "hate speech"—are roughly in line with the views of President-elect Donald Trump and other conservative Republicans, who've long argued that Facebook unduly suppressed their speech while promoting left-wing ideology. Zuckerberg said, in a video posted on Tuesday, that the decision was in no way political. Instead, he said, it was designed to "get back to our roots around free expression." The announcement—which came on the heels of Zuckerberg's decision to appoint cage-fighting entrepreneur Dana White to the board of directors of Meta Platforms Inc.—carried a whiff of not just opportunism but also desperation born of a decade's worth of ideological pretzeling. Zuckerberg's supposedly long-held commitment to free speech, as far as I can tell, dates to 2019, when he crafted a Trump-friendly founding myth to replace what most people understood as the actual founding story of Facebook. You see, when Zuckerberg was busy designing an app that allowed his Harvard dormmates to rate the attractiveness of their female classmates in the fall of 2003, what he was actually doing was giving his classmates a "voice," at least according to a speech he delivered at Georgetown University during the first Trump administration. Facebook wasn't about sharing party pics and "poking" your crush; it was about political opposition to the Iraq War. In Zuckerberg's mind, anyway.  Zuckerberg at a Meta event in Menlo Park, California, in 2023. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Zuckerberg in 2019 railed against the dangers posed by the restrictive censorship in China, but that was a new position, too. A few years earlier, Zuckerberg had built a tool to help the Chinese government censor Facebook posts, according to a New York Times report. In the speech, Zuckerberg claimed his goal all along was to make China less restrictive—but this rang hollow after a fawning charm offensive that included Mandarin lessons, photo ops in Beijing and a friendly meeting with President Xi Jinping. Zuckerberg's last free-speech era was short-lived. A year or so later, Zuckerberg flipped again, embracing a much stricter content moderation regime that just so happened to roughly coincide with the Republicans' losing power. Officially, Zuckerberg banned Trump for the alleged role he played in inciting the failed insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Zuckerberg gave no indication that it had anything to do with the fact that Trump, who'd flouted Facebook's rules for months, was no longer in a position of power. Of course, after Trump's 2024 campaign, which included a threat to throw Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life, Zuckerberg has flip-flopped again. Now he's writing checks, hiring Trump-aligned cage-fighting entrepreneurs to help him run his technology company and rediscovering lost principles. Speaking of potential cage fights: On this week's Elon, Inc. podcast, Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner pointed out that Zuckerberg's products have been ruthlessly effective in cloning popular features of rival social networks—especially Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter—but that he rarely admits it. (There's that authenticity thing again.) What makes these changes different was that Zuckerberg explicitly praised X–the Elon Musk version of Twitter–and even called out Musk's crowdsourced fact-checking program, Community Notes. He referred to Facebook's new watered-down fact-checking program by the same name. This was new and telling. Remember, the two billionaires have long circled the idea of resolving their differences with their fists. And while Zuckerberg seems at pains to show how strong he is—both in terms of his business and his physique—Facebook has serious vulnerabilities. Beyond Trump's prison threats, Meta faces a Federal Trade Commission case that's headed to trial in April and a separate effort that would severely restrict Facebook's ability to collect data from children. And then there's a potential ban of TikTok. Trump initially favored banning the Chinese-owned Facebook competitor but reversed course last year, saying he didn't want to help Facebook, which Trump called an "enemy of the people." Zuckerberg would surely appreciate a new change of heart, as TikTok continues to eat away at Facebook's market share. This hints at another risk that's arguably more serious than the political ones Zuckerberg faces at the moment: that there's a cultural price to be paid for all this naked politicking, even if Zuckerberg succeeds in convincing Trump that he's an ally. It's true that Meta's stock has soared, but that's thanks largely to cost-cutting and investor optimism about artificial intelligence. The company's core products are no longer growing much, having long ago crossed over from cool to cringe. Maybe Zuckerberg's latest look will, against all odds, somehow bring back the cool. But a trip to Mar-a-Lago won't. There are limits to even Trump's power. |
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