Mark Zuckerberg must be starting to wonder if it was worth shelling out $25m in a donation to the foundation to build Donald Trump’s presidential library when he capitulated in a lawsuit over Trump’s suspension from Facebook following the 6 January riots. Or whether it was worth making a $1m donation to the president’s inaugural committee in December. Or flying to Mar-a-Lago to hang out with Trump before the inauguration. Or even bothering with that new suit for the big day itself.
For, despite all that, plus three recent trips to the White House and intense lobbying by Meta executives to encourage the president to settle an anti-monopoly case against the company, the trial has begun. The Federal Trade Commission claims Meta destroyed rivals with a “buy-or-bury strategy” – paying over the odds to acquire Instagram for $1bn in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014. If Zuckerberg loses, he could be forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. It would dramatically change how Big Tech works.
For news consumers, the case might just provide a chink of light in a darkening media world. Thirty per cent of Brits get their news from Facebook. Worldwide it has 3.5 billion users. It may have lost some of its base to TikTok and YouTube, but it still wields enormous influence.
And as the journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has written: “Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues.” Meta had been desperate for Trump to stop the trial, but senior White House aides were reportedly irritated by its “aggressive” lobbying and unconvinced by Zuckerberg’s born-again Maga machismo.
It’s been a worrying few days for Big Tech bullies. On 21 April, Google was back in court in the US to hear what action will be taken to unpick its online search monopoly after it lost a case last year. On 17 April another court ruled Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in its advertising technology, allowing the company to charge higher prices and take bigger proportions of sales. Google’s control over search and ad technology has starved publishers of revenue and left them in a permanent battle for attention in Google rankings. It’s this collapse in income that lies behind the hollowing out of local and national newsrooms across Britain.
Google, too, had hoped to gain favour with the new president, also donating $1m to the inauguration at which chief executive Sundar Pichai sat on the dais alongside Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. And yet now the business is left slugging it out for survival in the courts.
It is a cause for hope that moves are being made to tackle the Big Tech bros who control our news and political debate. But it’s not over yet. Months of appeals and wranglings in the Google cases lie ahead. And Trump may yet do a deal with those who have paid homage. For now, though, it seems satisfying that those who prostrated themselves before King Donald are being treated with what looks like quiet contempt.
The Daily Telegraph sale limps into a new lap with news that the private equity firm RedBird Capital, which was part of a consortium blocked from buying the title last spring, may attempt to continue with the purchase – but without its bid’s majority investor, the UAE-based IMI. The joint RedBird IMI bid came a cropper when the government ruled against the foreign ownership of British news titles. Since then a string of investors have expressed interest in taking on the paper, but all have baulked at the £500m price tag.
The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, is yet to decide what proportion of foreign investment is acceptable in a news business – which could determine if IMI is able to retain a smaller holding. In the meantime, RedBird is scouting around for new partners, while Telegraph staff are scouting around for new jobs far from the current regime of insecurity and falling investment.
Where will one find a nanny now? The closure of the Lady magazine in print was announced over the Easter break. It ended a 140-year history of the “journal for gentlewomen”, whose writers included Lewis Carroll, Nancy Mitford and Stella Gibbons. Gone too are its classified pages packed with job adverts for nannies, footmen and, more recently, live-in carers for its ageing readership.
The Lady went into liquidation after battling changes in reading habits and a societal shift away from “domestic” content – not to mention a £360,000 tax bill. And yet, did it bow out too soon – just as the conservative tradwife trend arrives in Britain from the US?
There are now 133 million “tradwife” posts on TikTok, and the US is awash with social media influencers and magazines promoting the virtues of domesticity. The model Nara Smith has built a $6m fortune from posting videos of herself making homemade cocoa puffs and ketchup while wearing pastel frocks, while Hannah Neeleman is estimated to earn $650,000 a year from videos chronicling farm life as a mother of eight (although very much without the support of a nanny). Perhaps it was too late for the Lady after all.
[See also: Will the nightmare sale of the Telegraph ever end?]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer