We’re All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This
Mark Zuckerberg is sick of the woke politics governing his social feeds. He’s tired of the censorship and social-media referees meddling in free speech. We’re in a “new era” now, he said in a video today, announcing that he plans to replace Facebook and Instagram fact-checkers with a system of community notes similar to the one on X, the rival platform owned by Elon Musk. Meta will also now prioritize “civic content,” a.k.a. political content, not hide from it.
The social-media hall monitors have been so restrictive on “topics of immigration and gender that they’re out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said with the zeal of an activist. He spoke about “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech” following “nonstop” concerns about misinformation from the “legacy media” and four years of the United States government “pushing for censorship.” It is clear from Zuckerberg’s announcement that he views establishment powers as having tried and failed to solve political problems by suppressing his users. That message is sure to delight Donald Trump and the incoming administration. But there’s one tiny hitch. Zuckerberg is talking about himself and his own policies. The establishment? That’s him.
The changes to Meta’s properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, are being framed by the CEO as a return “to our roots around free expression.” This bit of framing is key, painting him as having been right all along. It also conveniently elides nearly a decade of decisions made by Zuckerberg, who not only is Meta’s founder but also holds a majority of voting power in the company, meaning the board cannot vote him out. He is Meta’s unimpeachable king.
[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]
I don’t have access to Zuckerberg’s brain, so I can’t know the precise reasons for his reversal. Has he been genuinely red-pilled by UFC founder (and new Meta board member) Dana White and his jiu-jitsu friends? Is he jealous of Musk, who seems to be having a good time palling around with Trump and turning X into 4chan? Is he simply an opportunist cozying up to the incoming administration? Or is he terrified that Trump—who not long ago threatened to send him to jail—will follow through on his promises of retribution against tech executives who don’t bend to his whims? Is this indeed just an opportunity for Meta to get back to its relatively unmoderated roots? My money is that Zuckerberg’s new posture—visiting Mar-a-Lago, donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and elevating Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican insider, to the top policy job at Meta—is motivated by all of the above.
Zuckerberg’s personal politics have always been inextricably linked to his company’s political and financial interests. Above all else, the Facebook founder seems compelled by any ideology that allows the company to grow rapidly and make money without having to take too much responsibility for what happens on its platforms. Zuckerberg knows which way the political wind is blowing and appears to be trying to ride it while, simultaneously, being at least a little bit afraid of it. When a reporter today asked Trump if he thought Meta’s policy changes were driven by his previous threats, he replied, “Probably.”
Zuckerberg’s motives are less important than his actions, which, at least right now, are inarguably MAGA-coded. (He said that he’s moving the content-review teams away from the biased, blue shores of California to the supposedly neutral land of Texas, for one.) They are also deeply cynical. After years of arguing that its users don’t want to see political content (unless they explicitly follow political accounts or pages), Meta is now arguing that it is time to promote “civic” material. The company is pandering to the right and a skewed definition of free speech after having spent the past few months actively restricting teens from seeing LGBTQ-related content on its platforms, as User Mag reported earlier this week. Just this morning, 404 Media reported that Meta’s human-resources team has been deleting criticism of White from Facebook Workplace, the internal platform where Meta employees communicate.
Such hypocrisy ought to be expected from Zuckerberg, whose announcement carries the energy of a guy complaining about a problem he’s responsible for. Zuckerberg has a rich history of making editorial decisions for Meta’s platforms, watching them play out, and then reacting to them as if they were the result of some outside force. In 2013, I watched as Facebook flooded publishers with traffic, thanks to a deliberate algorithmic change to prioritize news. I watched the company build a news division and product and hire a big name to run it. And after the 2016 election, when the company came under intense scrutiny from many of the same outlets that had previously benefited from its platform, I watched the company argue that it was reducing visibility of publishers in favor of posts from “friends and family.”
Meta’s history is littered with similar about-faces. In 2017, Zuckerberg gave a speech extolling Facebook’s groups and pages. The company changed its mission statement from “Making the world more open and connected” to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” The company prioritized groups over other content. As usual, Zuckerberg said he was reacting to the desires of his users (that this was also a way to increase engagement across the company’s platforms was surely a happy coincidence). But then, in 2021, after QAnon and Stop the Steal groups were found to operate unchecked on the platform, Zuckerberg announced that the company would stop recommending political groups to users, citing a need to “turn down the temperature” of the national conversation after the January 6 insurrection.
One way to look at this is that Meta has always been deeply, if begrudgingly, reactive in its moderation decisions. The company is hands-off until it ends up in a public-relations crisis and dragged in front of Congress. The company has argued that it is a neutral actor, that it has no interest in presiding over what people can and cannot say. And yet, this is the same company that, in 2020, declared that it was taking “new steps to protect the U.S. elections.” The contradictions abound. Facebook is averse to being an editorial entity, but it hired fact-checkers. It does not wish to be political, but it has an election war room (but please, don’t call it a war room). Zuckerberg is done with politics, but he’s flying down to Mar-a-Lago. You get the gist.
The end result of being so deeply reactive is that Zuckerberg ends up rather awkwardly at war with his own company. Currently, Meta’s new Trump-administration content free-for-all seems to be motivated by a sense of shame or sheepishness for how Meta responded to world events from March 2020 to January 7, 2021, the day Facebook banned Trump from its platforms for his role in inciting the rioters the day before. Despite speaking with clarity and conviction at the time, Zuckerberg seems to be letting the revisionist narratives of COVID and January 6 influence his thinking. As I wrote last year, “Decisions that seemed rational in 2020 and 2021 may seem irrational to him today—the product of a kind of pandemic anxiety.”
[Read: Mark Zuckerberg will never win]
I take Zuckerberg at his word that he feels the discourse has changed, especially when it’s consumed on platforms like X. That discourse is profoundly anti-institutional—less mainstream media, more Joe Rogan. (Rogan, of course, is now as mainstream as they come.) Zuckerberg may even be right that fact-checkers ultimately eroded trust among the skeptical more than they preserved the truth. But Meta is not an insurgent force—it’s a global behemoth with lobbyists and corporate interests. Zuckerberg is himself one of the world’s richest men. The sclerotic, slop-ridden wasteland of stale memes on its Facebook product, bloodless posts on Threads—a blatant clone of X—and hot people linking out to their OnlyFans profiles on Instagram are all products of a legacy institution that he presides over. That Zuckerberg should look out over his kingdom and see it as “out of touch” isn’t a criticism of “woke” Democrats or a regulation-crazy government: It’s a criticism of the way he himself capitulates.
Maybe this is Zuckerberg’s final pivot. Perhaps he’s wanted these changes all along and this moment will bring about a Muskian renaissance that is, at last, true to his own internal politics. But if one is searching for truisms to better understand Zuckerberg, I’m not sure there’s a more apt one than this quote, from a Facebook employee interviewed by BuzzFeed News in 2020. “He seems truly incapable of taking personal responsibility for decisions and actions at Facebook,” the employee said. The employee offered the quote in response to political violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the George Floyd protests, a conflict that Facebook groups played a role in inflaming. But the quote speaks to something more fundamental about the CEO. For as long as he’s been running his company, Zuckerberg has been anxiously gazing in the rearview mirror, unaware or unwilling to recognize the Mark Zuckerberg–size blind spot over his shoulder.