There is one week left until Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States and it is already taken for granted that there will be good harmony between the big tech and the White House. Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink or consigliere. But he has not been the only technology magnate to make a move: Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has personally donated one million dollars for the inauguration ceremony of the new mandate, the same amount contributed by Sam Altman (OpenAI) or Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber) and companies like Meta, Amazon or Perplexity.
There is also movement behind the scenes: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of Washington Postcensored the cartoon that illustrates this report and that shows several of the aforementioned characters paying homage to an aggrandized Trump. The Republican has invited Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads), to dinner at Mar-a-Lago (Florida), who has recently placed prominent Trumpists in important positions in the company.
Zuckerberg announced this week a very significant change to their platforms: Instagram and Facebook will eliminate external verification of content and replace it with a community comment system similar to that of It will be tested there throughout the year and, depending on the results, it will be considered for export to other countries, according to Meta sources explaining to Morning Express.
Zuckerberg’s move is relevant for several reasons. First, because it explicitly embraces the model designed by Musk, which has contributed to turning Twitter into the current X, where toxic content runs rampant. Second, because since 2017 Meta has been trying to champion the fight of social networks against the spread of disinformation and content that incites violence to try to turn the Cambridge Analytica scandal into an anecdote, the consulting firm that used private data from 80 millions of Facebook users to distribute personalized messages in favor of Trump’s candidacy before his election for the first term. And third, because just four years ago, on January 7, 2021, Zuckerberg deleted Donald Trump’s accounts after the assault on the Capitol. The new policy can be read, in this sense, as an attempt at redemption before the new emperor.
“Obviously, this change leads us to a scenario in which there will be more harmful content on-line”says Thomas Hughes, director general of the European Appeals Centre, an independent body that allows citizens to report problems with the platforms’ content management. Before assuming his position, Hughes was the head of the Oversight Board, a kind of appeals court enabled by Meta to ensure a neutral view on the thorniest issues. “There is a direct correlation between the investment of these large companies and the quality and sophistication of the content moderation they carry out,” he says. In 2023, UNESCO developed a guide on social media governance in which it considers it essential that data verification organizations participate in the process, something that Meta and X omit. “Content moderation is one of the most important, urgent problems and complexities of our time,” a spokesperson for the United Nations agency tells this newspaper.
The new game board
Zuckerberg and the rest of the technology moguls have no shortage of reasons to side with Trump. Regardless of how unpredictable and impulsive the next tenant of the White House may be, his party controls Congress and the Supreme Court. During the Joe Biden Administration, investigations have been opened against Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple for monopolistic practices. Trump has already said that breaking up these companies “can be a very dangerous thing” because he wants to “have big companies” to compete against China.
But the technology companies—except, perhaps, Musk’s—would be wrong to assume that they will have the unconditional favor of Washington. “Trump’s team has a divided view on these companies. On the one hand, it supports the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and all those technologies that are considered strategic in the race against China and for American supremacy, such as the development of semiconductors or quantum computing,” emphasizes Cecilia Rikap, professor of Economics at University College London and research director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) of that center. “But, on the other hand, Trump is fighting a very particular battle against content moderation decisions on social networks, especially with Meta, from which he feels greatly harmed.”
Many Republicans are suspicious of big tech. Among them, JD Vance, vice president-elect, who even initially expressed his support for the scrutiny to which Lina Khan, the president of the regulator (FTC), subjects technology companies. However, the replacement that Trump has sought for him is less interventionist and assures that he will pursue everything that threatens freedom of expression.
Rikap reads Zuckerberg’s move as an attempt to reach out to Trump, who once said of the young tycoon: “We are watching him closely, and if he does something illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in jail.” “It is telling him: I align with you, do not make progress in regulating social networks because we are going to do what you ask of us,” says the researcher.
The flirtation of technology companies with Trump makes even more sense if we consider the situation they are going through in the EU. The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) have imposed new transparency duties on these business giants and have opened investigations for abuse of power. Until now, the big tech They had to face alone what they considered legal harassment; With Trump in the White House, the situation may change. “Zuckerberg’s speech, which defends his new policy as a way to promote freedom of expression, is part of an ideological offensive that he wants to wage in the EU,” explains Simona Levi, founder of the collective in defense of digital rights Xnet and author of the book Democratic digitalization (Green Ray, 2024).
“The technology companies want to impose the American model, deregulated and privatized, on the rest of the world. They are putting pressure on the EU in that regard. It remains to be seen if Brussels decides to challenge the power of American companies or bow to it, as it has done in recent geopolitical conflicts,” says economist Ekaitz Cancela, author of Digital utopias (Verso Libros, 2023) and co-director of the Center for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination (CAII).
What happened to the user?
The alignment of the technology sector with power is more than notable. But there are some exceptions. A group of small investors and developers wants to buy TikTok, the Chinese platform that is facing a ban in the United States, to reform it in a way that respects user privacy and gives them control over their data. The idea would be to be able to turn it into a social network at the service of citizens, and not of the corporate interests that rule the rest.
That respect for users is something that will be missed in the new digital era that Zuckerberg has just inaugurated. No more quality filters: the more than 3 billion Facebook and Instagram users will be exposed to harmful content. “Community notes are useful depending on who makes them. Behind them there may be noble, commercial or ideological intentions,” argues Carmela Ríos, expert in social networks, mobile journalism and disinformation. “The level of acceptance of misinformation by users is enormous. The new Meta model means forcing the population to live inescapably with misinformation.” That’s the new standard in the Trump era.
