Heavy Lies Mark Zuckerberg’s Crown
Hi friends —
The new year is upon us, and it has already been quite revealing. As Robert Caro wrote in his magnificent biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, “power always reveals” a person’s true character.
“When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary,” Caro wrote.
This week, Mark Zuckerberg revealed his true colors in what can only be described as a pledge of allegiance to incoming president Donald Trump. In a video message, he declared that Meta was abandoning fact-checking and dialing back on content moderation — a clear capitulation to right wing demands for less “censorship” of their speech that was often found to be in violation of Meta’s prohibitions against hate speech and incitement to violence.
As I wrote in my latest New York Times Opinion piece (gift link), the billionaire Facebook founders’ actions show us what it looks like when a mature company stops innovating on its products and instead seeks to maintain its market power through political influence.
What’s the Problem? Meta profits and stock price are at all-time highs. But this masks a deeper ailment: Meta is not growing organically. Its growth is largely due to cost-cutting and acquisitions.
This is not surprising given that more than 3 billion people use one of Meta’s products - primarily Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — at least once a month. That’s nearly half of the people on the planet. It’s easy to understand why Meta’s user growth has largely plateaued.
But investors demand constant growth. And that means Meta has to keep promising future technological breakthroughs. First, it poured nearly $50 billion into the “Metaverse” - a virtual reality world that required users to wear bulky headsets and interact with avatars that lacked legs. Not surprisingly, it flopped.
Next it poured tens of billions into artificial intelligence, an arena that has yet to prove profitable and is populated by well-financed competitors. Meta has suffered embarrassing flops, most recently with an AI avatar that engaged in what Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah called “digital blackface.”
Zuckerberg’s most recent move has been to promise a new form of vaporware — virtual reality glasses that he says will be the “next major computing platform” once they are ready in a few years.
But the truth is that Zuckerberg is mostly innovating at playing politics. He successfully helped influence the Biden administration to ban his most threatening competitor, TikTok, and now seems to have convinced the Trump administration to support him in slashing the expense keeping his platforms clean of lies, hate and violence.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” he said in his video announcement.
Why it Matters. Content moderation is important. As The Verge Cofounder and Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel has so eloquently put it: “The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation.”
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp would not be usable without thousands of humans and robots combing through posts to remove the unimaginable amounts of horrific hate speech, violence, sexual exploitation, terrorism and more that are regularly uploaded.
So when Zuckerberg says that Meta will cut back on content moderation, what he really means is Meta will adjust its content moderation to be more palatable to the incoming administration — which wants the ability to spread lies about the 2020 election, immigrants, trans people and whoever else they gin up as targets for their rage.
This is a deliberate politicization of a platform that previously aimed to be non-political. (Proof that it is political is how hard Meta is trying to position Zuckerberg’s pivot as apolitical).
What Can Be Done? Zuckerberg has thrown down the gauntlet to the world. He is claiming he has the backing of the incoming president in not complying with content moderation laws imposed around the globe. But it’s not clear if its a bluff.
It will be interesting to see if the European Union, which recently enacted robust laws requiring content moderation, continues to enforce its laws or if they will blink due to fear of Trump.
In the United States, where we have failed to regulate social media, the real test will be if the Trump Administration continues to pursue the Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing antitrust case against Meta, which is set to go to trial in April.
I believe that the best way to deal with a bully is to stand up to them. Governments, as representatives of the people who elected them, should push back on corporations that try to steamroll them.
But since I have no sway over those governments, I’ll continue to avoid Meta’s platforms as much as possible. I was never a big fan, but now that Zuckerberg has pledged allegiance to a political agenda, I am even less interested. So I will be using Signal instead of WhatsApp, Bluesky instead of Instagram, Threads and Facebook. You might consider switching, too.
As always, thanks for reading!
Best
Julia