Moderation on Facebook and Instagram: Mark Zuckerberg panics

Analyse

The surprise is total: the boss of Meta has decided to relax moderation on Facebook and Instagram, to get closer to the free speech advocated by the MAGA clan. Pushed to the ropes by Trump and his bulldozer Elon Musk, Zuckerberg wants to save his butt.

At the beginning, a threat: “If he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison – like everyone else who cheats.” In his book Save Americareleased last September, Donald Trump had put Mark Zuckerberg in his sights.

Without providing the slightest proof, the future president of the United States has long accused Meta’s boss of having financially “plotted” against him in 2020, even if he “brought his very nice wife to the dinners”. Just plain Trump. Deciding to keep his ballot secret in 2024, Zuckerberg ventured to judge him “badass”, after seeing him survive an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on July 13.

Should we take it like a big flea in the ear?

Still, less than two weeks before Donald Trump’s (second) move to the Oval Office, Mark Zuckerberg is bowing to the next strong men of the United States. In the plural, since Elon Musk, eternal adversary, could well count on a spare room in the West Wing of the White House.

At the start of the week, we were treated to a series of announcements, which had everything to please the new power. A bright red transfer window on the Meta board of directors, to begin with. Dana White, powerful boss of the UFC fighting league and great ally of Donald Trump, but also Joel Kaplan, a die-hard Republican who notably served as deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush. A formidable lobbyist and now a “chief global affairs officer” for Zuckerberg.

A few hours after the announcement of his arrival in the den of Californian nerds, his young boss surprised everyone a second time. Facing the camera, the father of Facebook, Instagram and Threads announced that his social networks were going to “get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X. Starting with the United States” .

What follows is even more astonishing.

That’s not all. Accusing the traditional media of having put too much pressure on the dangers of disinformation, Zuckerberg says, half-heartedly, that he is tired of being taken for the joke. According to him, the fact-checkers were guilty of “too many errors and too much censorship” and above all showed themselves to be far too progressive.

So much so that to avoid political bias, Meta’s “Trust and Safety and content moderation” department is preparing to leave California, largely Democratic, to move to Texas, a deeply Republican state. (We hardly dare wonder how the employees received this brutal relocation.)

A speech that could have been attributed to Elon Musk or any supporter of blunt freedom of expression. Just four years after having banned Donald Trump from his social networks, rebounding from the assault on the Capitol, the little genius from Menlo Park suddenly seems to want to put on a MAGA cap, jump in a Cybertruck and join the gang at Mar-a -Lago. What he did at the end of last year to bury the hatchet and leave a million dollar envelope on the table.

A brutal devotion and a timing that questions. If Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook also dropped a million for the inauguration ceremony, as a show of good political-financial camaraderie, Mark Zuckerberg goes (much) further. In fact, and to put it bluntly, it “now allows users to assert that homosexual and transgender people suffer from mental illness”, as the specialist magazine wrote Wired.

Obviously more corporate, Joe Kaplan didn’t wait for his welcome drink to get his hands dirty. For the new chief global affairs officer of Meta, “it is not normal that things can be said on television or in Congress, but not on our platforms,” he said on Fox News early in the morning.

Coward or opportunist?

Why, in the space of a few hours and a presidential election, did California’s blue empire turn Texas red? One thing seems certain: Mark Zuckerberg is panicking. For a long time cramped between the sermons of the Democrats and the attacks of the Trumpists, he is undoubtedly tired of having the impression of never satisfying anyone. By blowing up his guardrails just before the arrival of the 47th President of the United States, it is his own butt that he is trying to save, aware that he is not on conquered territory.

Trump’s right-hand man was delighted on Tuesday afternoon.

It is also possible that he is simply taking advantage of Donald Trump’s new mandate to unleash the dogs and try to give a boost to his social networks, perhaps less muscular than the indomitable X platform. From the frightened progressive to the liberal opportunist, MAGA supporters have already chosen. For many far-right commentators, it is “out of the question to welcome” Zuckerberg into the fold.

Basically, everyone was taken by surprise. And we will have to wait several months before understanding the full scope (and potential seriousness) of these decisions. But Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction once again proves the immense weight of Donald Trump’s strong return to the top of the world.