Between the pale and bow-tied Mark Zuckerberg who appeared in the United States Senate in 2018 and the one with the baggy T-shirt, gold chain, luxury watch and curly hair who announced this week the change in Meta’s content policy, there is not only one image change. The founder of Facebook, now 40 years old, has gone from apologizing for the misinformation that circulated on his social network to aligning himself with Trumpism. The elimination of content verification has not even been the last episode of this metamorphosis. This same Friday, the head of human resources informed employees that Meta is eliminating its diversity, equality and inclusion policies in favor of minorities, a practice targeted by Donald Trump and his allies.
When Zuckerberg went to the Senate almost seven years ago, he was in the eye of the storm over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica personal data scandal. “We didn’t have a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I’m sorry. I founded Facebook, I run it, and I am responsible for what happens here,” said a contrite Zuckerberg. “It is not enough to just give people a voice. “We have to make sure that people are not using it to harm other people or to spread misinformation,” he added.
Zuckerberg had already apologized shortly after the 2016 election. “We take misinformation seriously,” he proclaimed then, announcing measures underway to combat it, including third-party verification that he has just removed. It will instead establish a community notes system similar to that used by X, the social network controlled by Elon Musk where hoaxes circulate freely, which the founder of Facebook expressly put as an example. In announcing the changes, he enunciated a new mea culpa: “We have reached a point where there are too many errors and too much censorship,” he said.
Among these apologies to the contrary, the social network Facebook has been subjected to crossfire between those who held it responsible for misinformation and those who accused it of censorship. And Zuckerberg has almost always chosen to side with power.
In 2019, Facebook announced that it was exempting politicians’ posts and ads from its fact-checking practices. Trump, then president, was able to spread hoaxes about Joe Biden in ads that some traditional networks refused to air because of his lies. In October of that year, Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he defended that position: “We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do it to help politicians, but because we believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians say. And if the content is newsworthy, we don’t remove it either, even if it would otherwise conflict with many of our rules,” he said. “I know many people disagree, but in general, I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy,” he added.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the election. Following the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Facebook suspended Trump’s account. The company also complied with the Biden Government’s requests to combat misinformation about the pandemic, once again aligning itself with power. At the same time, Meta stopped highlighting political content on its social networks (Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads) in favor of entertainment and personal relationships.
These political ups and downs have been accompanied by a change in style that materialized last year, but that had been brewing for some time. Peter Thiel, a technology investor for whom the vice president-elect, JD Vance, worked, and a long-term mentor of the founder of Facebook, recommended to Zuckerberg in 2020 – in an email that was later made public in a judicial proceeding – that he stop appearing as “a construction baby boomer how a person is supposed to behave millennialwell educated.” The last image of himself in a suit and tie that he shared on Instagram is from 2020; Since then, however, he has published dozens of photos and videos in which he is seen practicing martial arts and combat sports.
It was last year, however, when he left his gray T-shirt behind, let his curls grow and renewed his wardrobe. “He looks like someone who has been trying on five years of menswear trends in five months,” Jacob Gallagher, then a menswear columnist for The Wall Street Journal.Almost overnight, he acquired a collection of super-luxury watches, apparently after admiring Indian billionaire Anant Ambani’s watch at his wedding. In a single month he exhibited five different ones, according to the magazine GQ.
Ideologically, Zuckerberg’s shift to the right has become more visible in recent months. He strongly praised Trump for his response to the attack he suffered in July. In August, in a letter to a Republican congressman, he criticized the Biden administration for “repeatedly” pressuring the company to remove misinformation about the pandemic and vaccines. In that same letter, he said about his political activity: “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or the other, or appear to play one.”
After the November elections, the squeamishness stopped. He went to Mar-a-Lago at the end of that month to kiss the president-elect’s ring. He decided to donate a million dollars for the expenses of the transition of power. The gestures followed one another. Former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, in charge of regulatory affairs and institutional relations, announced his resignation and Zuckerberg put Joel Kaplan, an executive with close ties to the Republicans, in charge of regulatory and institutional relations responsibilities. company since 2011 and served as Clegg’s number two. Later, he hired Dana White as an advisor to Meta, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), organizer of professional martial arts tournaments, friend and ally of Trump since the magnate hosted his fights at his Atlantic City complex. when wrestling, of which the president-elect is a great fan, was in the doldrums.
And then came the change in its content policy. Eliminating third-party verification is only part of it. Tolerance against hate speech also increases. In his explanations on Instagram, Zuckerberg said Meta removed “restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of step with dominant discourse,” citing “the recent election” as a catalyst.
The digital The Interceptt has revealed the preparation materials with some of the phrases that become admissible. They include attacks on immigrants (“immigrants are dirty, disgusting pieces of shit”; “Mexican immigrants are trash”; “these damn immigrants are not trustworthy, they are all criminals”), on the LGTBI community (“gays are weirdos”, “gays are sinners”; “trans people are immoral”; “trans people are mentally ill”) or insults that include genitals (“Italians are assholes”).
When Trump was asked if he thought Meta’s policy changes were a result of his pressure on Zuckerberg, he replied with a smug nod: “Probably, probably.”
