Silicon Valley: bending the knee to Donald Trump

Silicon Valley billionaires are busy finding ways to "kiss Donald Trump's ass", said Nikki McCann Ramirez in Rolling Stone. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is donating $1 million to the president-elect's inauguration fund; Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have made similar donations; Elon Musk has styled himself "first buddy". And now Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg is sucking up to the man who not long ago called him "Zuckerschmuck" and said that he should be jailed if he "interfered" in the election.

After flying to Mar-a-Lago to dine with Trump and placing one of his cronies, Dana White, on Meta's board of directors, Zuckerberg has announced plans to dial back content moderation on Facebook and Instagram. Meta will stop using third-party fact-checkers, and will instead, like X/Twitter, rely on users adding context and corrections. Fact-checkers, he said, were "too politically biased". In short, Zuckerberg has gone full Musk, said Chris Stokel-Walker in The Guardian. This will spell disaster for objective fact on Meta's platforms. Welcome to a "new era of lies".

These changes are no doubt partly motivated by Zuckerberg's desire to mend fences with Trump, said The Wall Street Journal. But they're also a response to the election, in which voters expressed a clear frustration with "progressive imperialism". There's no denying that Meta's fact-checking system did tip over into censorship at times, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. Among the stories that it wrongly suppressed was the New York Post's exposé about Hunter Biden's laptop, and speculation that Covid came from a lab leak in China.

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No doubt this move will inject more "right-wing garbage" into the public sphere, said Natasha Lennard on The Intercept. But the idea that these gatekeepers could deliver us from demagoguery was always misplaced. One study found that posts labelled as false by Facebook only saw an 8% reduction in sharing. If debunking misinformation worked, Trump wouldn't be where he is today. We're probably wrong, anyway, to look at these platforms as either magically persuasive or as "hubs for digital democracy". Ultimately, they're profit-generating tools for their self-interested owners. Zuckerberg, lest we forget, is still facing an antitrust lawsuit over claims that Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition. "Luckily for him, Trump responds well to bootlicking."