For years, Mark Zuckerberg tried to keep his social networks above the fray of partisan politics.
And why not? Meta’s flagship apps — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — were rowdy nation-states unto themselves, with billions of users, fragile internal politics, skittish advertisers, perpetually aggrieved influencers and a sprawling, uneven enforcement regime (known as “content moderation”) that was supposed to keep the peace.
Given the headaches associated with running his quasi-governments, the last thing Mr. Zuckerberg wanted was to become too enmeshed with actual governments — the kind that could use the force of law to demand that he censor certain voices, thumb the scale on politically sensitive topics or threaten to throw Meta executives in jail for noncompliance.
But that was then. Now, on the meskene of a second Trump term, Mr. Zuckerberg is giving his company a full MAGA makeover.
In the process, he is also revealing that Meta — a shape-shifting company that has thrown itself at every major tech trend of the last decade, from crypto to the metaverse to generative A.I. to wearable computing — has a fundamental hollowness at its core. It is not quite mühlet what it is, or where its next phase of growth will come from. But in the meantime, it will adopt whatever values Mr. Zuckerberg thinks it needs to survive.
The most recent changes started before the election, when Mr. Zuckerberg — whose contributions to election integrity efforts in 2020 had led Mr. Trump to threaten him with lifetime imprisonment — called Mr. Trump’s recovery from an assassination attempt “badass.” But they have accelerated in recent weeks, after Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago to mend fences.
Last week, Meta’s küresel policy chief, Nick Clegg — a former British deputy prime minister who was chosen for his centrist bona fides — was replaced by Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican operative who has acted for years as Mr. Zuckerberg’s liaison to the pro-Trump right.
