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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Mark Zuckerberg was once forced to confirm that “not a lizard” during a live online Q&A session. It wasn’t the first or last time people suggested the pale Facebook founder with somewhat robotic mannerisms was some kind of alien. You have to love the internet.
These days, however, the Meta boss has a whole new aesthetic: less lizard man, more standard billionaire, tech bro. Gone are the modest gray T-shirts, tightly fitted over the slender figure; in their place, an oversized T worn over a bulging body, accessorized with a gold chain and a $900,000 watch. The The Julius Caesar hairstyle has also been replaced with a loose, California-casual curly mop, and Zuckerberg’s skin has gone from deathly pale to verging on “tan” (the Americans insist that’s an adjective).
I might even say that if you were standing in the same room with Zuck, you’d notice he was wearing a new scent – maybe quite musky. With his new look comes some new opinions, and it seems that they were heavily influenced by a certain fellow West Coast billionaire.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around freedom of expression,” Zuckerberg said video statement posted on Meta’s website on Tuesday. In it, he explained that the company will scrap the teams of professional fact-checkers it currently employs and replace them with a crowdsourced “community notes” system, much like Elon Musk’s X has. That will be just in the US to begin with, although he would also “work with President Trump to push back governments around the world.”
“Governments and legacy media are pushing more and more censorship,” Zuck said (note the use of the term “legacy media,” one of Musk’s favorites). “But now we have an opportunity to restore freedom of expression, and I’m excited to take advantage of it.”
I should start by saying that I have some major problems with the whole concept of fact-checking in the context of social media, which I have expressed publicly several times. When a Bloomberg columnist asked for examples of fact-checkers showing political bias, Meta returned three texts, including column I wrote in 2021in which I argued that fact-checking is often used as censorship. I have too written positively about community notes, although that system also has limitations.
And while the spread of misinformation and misinformation online worries me a lot, it’s pretty much impossible for fact-checking to be done truly objectively, given that all people have biases. They have to decide which claims to check and which to ignore. So the idea that you can thoroughly “fact check” an entire social network has always been a fantasy. And there is little financial incentive for platforms to do so (unless they fear being fined by regulators).
The problem I have with all of this isn’t so much the content of what’s happening in the Meta. I even think that moving content moderation teams from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas — a Democratic city in a mostly heavily Republican state — to “help address concerns that biased employees are over-censoring content,” as Zuckerberg wrote on Threads , would be pretty reasonable idea. But the very wording of it betrays his true motives: it’s not about principles, it’s about optics and pleasing the future resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
My problem with Zuckerberg is his spinelessness and opportunism. Ask yourself this: Is there any chance that Zuckerberg will make all these changes to Meta — he also appointed Trump ally Dan White to the board, and replaced Nick Clegg with prominent Republican Joel Kaplan as global affairs chairman — if Kamala Harris had won in November?
Even Trump himself doesn’t think so. Last year, he warned that Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if the boss of Meta tried to “conspire” against him. Asked Tuesday if Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats [Trump had] done to him in the past” with this fact-checking twist, the president-elect replied, “Probably.”
Zuckerberg might talk about how he won’t give in to government demands anymore, but he’s still giving in – just to different demands. In many ways, all this means is that Zuckerberg is less dangerous than Musk. It is clear in which direction the influence was exerted when the boss of Meta went to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. It goes where the wind blows.
I would feel more comfortable if the man in charge of the platforms used by two-fifths of the world’s population showed some moral courage and leadership. He might successfully transform his image, but at least lizards have a backbone.
