How time flies. Just months ago Mark Zuckerberg and Meta were all about moderation, “meaningful relationships” and #bekind. “If you do good things for people in the world, that comes back and you benefit from it over time,” he once wrote, presumably as the caption to one of those many sunset pictures on one of his platforms, Instagram.
Now he’s done with the girly talk, reinventing himself as a fully geezered-up member of the manosphere. The one-time proud Swiftie “girl dad” has called for more “masculine energy” at work on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, on which he also attacked the Biden administration for pressuring Facebook to remove Covid vaccine misinformation.
Zuckerberg has posed for bicep-bulging pictures with “awesome” new Meta board member, Trump pal and UFC martial arts boss Dana White. And after years of insisting users don’t want news and politics on their feeds, destabilising the media organisations that create it, he’s now decided that they do.
He’s abandoned fact-checking, wrongly (and dangerously) inferring those carrying out this valuable work are “censors”. Third-party fact-checkers employed by Facebook did just that – checked facts. Whether posts were removed was down to the company itself. Now there will be moderation for only the most extreme content: terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
There is a good argument to be had about whether the content moderation has fuelled mistrust and polarisation or shielded users from hate speech and misinformation. Zuckerberg may also legitimately believe that it’s “time to get back to our roots around free expression”. But he also faces potentially catastrophic legal and business challenges this year – not to mention a president who six months ago threatened to jail him for life should he attempt to “plot against” the Republican Party during the 2024 election.
In April, Meta will face an anti-monopoly case in which the US Federal Trade Commission will claim the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to stifle competition. It will demand they are sold. A second trial will accuse Meta of knowingly making platforms addictive and fuelling a teenage mental health crisis. The evidence could be hugely damaging; parents and young people who claim their lives have been permanently damaged by the company’s dopamine-hit business model will give witness statements. Finally, shareholders are suing Meta for withholding information around the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal which broke in 2018.
Zuckerberg is also keen to dodge litigation over the violation of copyright law for mass scraping people’s content to train AI models, and desperate to have Trump’s backing as the rest of the world desperately attempts to better regulate social platforms.
A slew of UFC-style fights are in store for Meta, and he needs Trump’s testosterone team in his corner. “He’s got a strong backbone,” Zuckerberg has said of Dana White – a quality seemingly entirely absent in the tech boss himself.
Could Dominic Cummings really be cosying up to Elon Musk to help him plan his X attacks on the British government and our wider politics? Quite possibly. As my mother-in-law likes to say: “As God made them, he matched them.”
Musk, a narcissist who believes he is surrounded by morons, quit his native South Africa as Nelson Mandela was about to walk free. Cummings, a narcissist who believes he is surrounded by morons, quit his London lockdown home to take his family and their Covid symptoms to County Durham.
And yet, whether the pair are in cahoots or not, the mere suggestion of Cummings’ involvement has to be the best means of toxifying Musk in Britain – perhaps only short of him being endorsed by Prince Andrew.
Meanwhile, there’s trouble in Maga paradise after Trump’s former hard-right adviser Steve Bannon called Musk “racist” and a “truly evil guy”. Bannon knows a bad guy when he sees one, having just served four months in a Connecticut jail as (as he put it) a “political prisoner of Nancy Pelosi”.
Bannon has accused Musk of “techno-feudalism on a global scale”. A charge on which we can agree and may yet stick.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is looking at replacing the troubled BBC licence fee with a “telly tax” and making the corporation a mutual organisation, owned by the public. The change would kick in when the BBC’s current charter runs out at the end of 2027.
The drumbeat of opposition to the £174-a-year fee has grown louder as people change their viewing habits and competition from streaming services grows. Some way has to be found to reform and protect the very best of our public broadcaster. But brace yourself for this to become the culture-war topic of the year when public consultation begins on funding an institution increasing numbers believe to be a mouthpiece of the elite in the midst of an ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
[See also: Mark Zuckerberg leads the new oligarchs paying tribute to Donald Trump]
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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors