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Four years ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg banned Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram, saying the risks of allowing him on those platforms were “just too great” after Trump repeatedly used took over these sites to spread electoral lies and encourage the January 6 crowd.
A lot has changed.
Now Zuckerberg makes it clear that Meta and MAGA can be heard.
The social media giant is canning its fact checkers and making its platforms look a little more like “first boyfriend” Elon Musk. At the same time, Meta named Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White on her board of directors of directors Monday, days after naming Joel Kaplan, the company’s top Republican lobbyist, as its new head of global affairs. Meta was one of several major tech companies to donate $1 million to Trump’s project. inauguration fund. And Zuckerberg – that Trump once threatened sentenced to life in prison – has personally made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to dine with the new president since the election.
While Zuckerberg is clearly trying to protect Meta from the looming threat of Trump corporate remuneration tour, it also faces potential disaster if Meta’s advertisers leak and users begin to associate the brand – already tarnished by AI neglect and a years-long lack of innovation – with the kind of unsavory characters which now dominate X.
On Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg took to the president-elect’s favorite television network, Fox News, to announce that the world’s dominant social media platforms are now, for all intents and purposes, pro-Trump.
Meta is getting rid of its third-party fact-checkers, Zuckerberg said, because they were “too politically biased,” made too many mistakes “and destroyed more trust than they created” – unfalsifiable statements that echo the long-standing right. claim that Facebook censors conservative views. Meta will replace fact checkers with “community notes” similar to X, where users can add comments to posts that may contain false information.
In another questionable decision announced Tuesday, Zuckerberg added that Meta will move its content moderation team to Texas from California, saying this would “eliminate the fear of biased employees excessively censoring content.” (Meta did not respond to CNN’s question about why a team located in Texas would be less biased than a team in California.)
The hits continued on Tuesday, like my colleague Clare Duffy reported that Meta has quietly updated its guidelines for free users who want to label gay and transgender people as “mentally ill” or women as “household objects” and “property.”
All of this gives Meta some confidence to enter the era of Trump 2.0. As business leaders remember the first round well, Trump showed little restraint when he felt that corporations were not being fair enough. Meta’s the stock fell in March, after Trump called CNBC to call Facebook the “enemy of the people.”
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If Meta took the harder line she invoked four years ago, she could expect to find herself in Trump’s social media crosshairs and be barred from rooms where rivals like Musk take decisions about the future of technology.
But Meta’s repositioning is not a foolproof business plan. Take a look at X, the site Musk acquired in 2022 when it was called Twitter. Musk remade the site in his own image, reinstating white nationalist and other offensive accounts that had been banned under Twitter’s safety guidelines. Advertisers, wary of their products appearing alongside hate speech, rushed to the exits. Millions of users, just as unhappy with the return of neo-Nazis to the platform, have also moved to competitors like Bluesky and Meta’s Threads.
The value of cratered 80% since Musk bought it, according to estimates from investment giant Fidelity.
This isn’t a big deal for X and Musk, who could theoretically finance the entire operation themselves.
The same cannot be said for Meta, one of the most valuable public companies in the world, with a market capitalization of $1.5 trillion.
“Brand safety remains a key factor in determining where advertisers spend their budgets,” Jasmine Enberg, Emarketer principal analyst, said in an email Tuesday. “Social media is already a minefield for content that many brands deem dangerous, and Meta’s change could exacerbate these problems. »
Even a slight drop in engagement could hurt the business, Enberg said.
We’ve seen it before.
In 2022, Meta lost nearly $240 billion of market value in a single day – the biggest drop of a company in one day value in the history of the American stock market at the time — after reporting a slight decline in Facebook’s daily active users and an 8% drop in quarterly profit.
This hits Zuckerberg where he lives, because he is the largest individual shareholder, says Cory Doctorow, a journalist, author and activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit. But more importantly, the stock market swings hit Meta’s ruling class, wealthy but not billionaires.
“Zuckerberg is safe from the consequences of his bad choices until he doesn’t – until things reach a breaking point… and then he tends to panic,” m ‘Doctorow said. “Tech calls these panics ‘pivots,’ but they are simply the result of being the CEO of a company that is experiencing anemic growth, or even contraction, and seeing the street go crazy against you. »
Past “pivots” include the Metaverse, the sci-fi nonsense that Zuckerberg touted as the future of the company three years ago. More recently, Meta is testing its own AI-generated “Users” in an apparent ploy for the goose’s engagement.
“They are now at the end of a long line of extremely bad choices,” Doctorow said. Which is not to say that Meta is doomed per se. “But I think they’re on the verge of becoming something of a zombie – like MySpace is today. MySpace still exists. It’s just AI-generated slop and spam.”