The Brooklyn Rail

Tech bro billionaires have all gotten the message that they need to get onboard the Trump Train as quickly as they can now or risk being left behind and missing the lucrative ride ahead. Mark Zuckerberg, always the last to know and the first to debase himself in the most transparently skeezy way, announced on Tuesday that Facebook and Instagram were in danger of being “out of touch with mainstream discourse,” and will now eliminate any attempt at fact-checking and will let Trumpers themselves decide what is real and true from now on. This will apparently “allow broader discourse on sensitive topics like immigration and gender identity.” Meta platforms will henceforth also fully adopt the Musk/Trump attitude toward racist, misogynist, and xenophobic speech, i.e., treating it all as “satire and humor.” Meta owns two-thirds of all social media globally.

In the magaverse, “free speech” means being able to say things that are demonstrably, objectively untrue without being challenged, checked or corrected. And it means saying things that are racist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic without being challenged, checked or corrected.

Mark rightly said “We’re going to get back to our roots around free expression,” meaning that they’ll gladly go back to the time when Facebook was a site where insecure men graded women for their hotness in secret so girls wouldn’t know they were doing it. It was originally only open to Harvard students, so it’s really been all about “Community Notes” all along, if “Community Notes” means mutual reinforcement of retrograde views. Zuckerberg also announced he’s moving the content moderation parts of Meta from blue California to red Texas, “ in order to “eliminate bias,” as Musk did with X. Zuckerberg went to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and forked over a million dollars to the “inauguration fund,” then added Trump sycophant Dana White to his Meta board on Monday. Strong moves, Mark. Really badass. Even Elon says it’s cool.

When asked about Meta’s change in direction, Trump graciously said it was “probably” a result of all the threats he’s been making against Zuckerberg, including the recent one in his book Save America, threatening Zuckerberg with “life in prison” if he continued to support election integrity during Trump’s second term. And the New York Post’s editorial board warned Trump not to trust Zuckerberg’s hard right turn, saying his company “remains riddled with lefty bias,” and is still mired in what the Post calls “the censorship industrial complex.”¹

At a rally in 2022, Trump said “Last week, the weirdo—he’s a weirdo— Mark Zuckerberg came to the White House, kissed my ass all night.” And after Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13th and raised his fist, Zuckerberg gushed, calling it “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Joel Kaplan, newly elevated to the most senior policy role at Meta and coincidentally the one person in Metaville farthest to the MAGA right, told Fox & Friends on Tuesday that Meta now sees “opportunities for partnership” with the Trump administration, on this matter and also in “promoting American business and America’s technological edge.” And he included this valentine to Elon Musk: “I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression and that’s been really constructive and productive, and we’re just glad that we’ve got the opportunity now to make these kinds of changes and to get back to our roots in free expression.”

Neither Kaplan nor Zuckerberg mentioned that the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Meta for maintaining a social media monopoly with Instagram and WhatsApp is set to go to trial in April. But that was when Lina Khan was the FTC chair. Trump has picked FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to succeed Kahn, and has said “Andrew will be the most America First and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our country’s history.” And not so gung-ho on antitrust enforcement. The Tech bros are looking for movement from Trump on all of their pet causes: taxes, deregulation, anti-antitrust, and crypto. If some of their H-1B visa holders get swept up in the anti-immigrant frenzy, they can live with that.

Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Spotify’s Daniel Eck have already “obeyed in advance” when it comes to the incoming regime. As Zuckerberg acknowledged, this is indeed “a cultural tipping point” that’s been a long time coming. And the Tech bros are all falling to their knees right on cue.