The MAGAfication of Mark Zuckerberg
The Meta CEO wants the left to leave him alone so he can shape our collective future
Until pretty recently, if you thought of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you’d probably come up with a flesh-and-blood automaton whose mission to connect the world turned into the upending of political systems and poisoning of our information environment — not to mention that weird metaverse side project. Accusations his platform helped get Donald Trump elected in 2016 led to a series of scandals the company struggled to effectively respond to — at least until another billionaire rose to take his crown.
By July 2023, some of Zuckerberg’s detractors were ready to give him a pass because they’d found a new enemy. That month, Meta launched Threads, its competitor to an increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-filled Twitter/X. Zuckerberg’s opportunistic move to take advantage of Twitter’s struggles under its new owner was recast by some of Elon Musk’s newfound critics as a political move to show Meta was different. All of a sudden, a company with one of the worst reputations in tech was being positioned as something of a liberal darling.
Zuckerberg’s new fans wanted to see him as Musk’s foil — the better social media baron — despite history showing they were two sides of the same coin. The billionaires even played into the supposed rivalry by suggesting they were going to physically fight one another, as robotic Zuckerberg morphed into a mixed martial arts enthusiast. When he unveiled a more muscular build, alongside baggy shirts and gold chains a little later, segments of social media went wild and it seemed like the days of being one the most hated corporate executives in Silicon Valley were behind him. But Zuckerberg was never who those newfound Musk haters wanted him to be.
In 2023, Meta had lifted its ban on Donald Trump, before rolling back the final restrictions on July 12, 2024. The following day, Trump suffered an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. Zuckerberg called Trump to say he was “praying” for him, and less than a week later he said Trump was a “badass”, claiming it wasn’t an explicit endorsement. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg refused to renew his support for local electoral efforts after it had been criticized by Republicans and Meta continued rolling back policies it had implemented to safeguard elections.
For some, Zuckerberg’s recent decision to ditch fact checkers in exchange for community notes, open the floodgates to hate speech, and begin ditching diversity and trans-inclusive initiatives might feel like a betrayal. But for those who didn’t fall for the expertly orchestrated public relations campaign that accompanied his makeover, it was hardly a surprise.
Charting Zuckerberg’s evolution
Zuckerberg spent years taking figurative punches before stepping into the ring to take some real ones. He was called out by the political right for supposed suppression of conservative speech — a dubious accusation — but faced real regulatory pressure from Democrats, especially when they returned to power in 2021. However, his response to that political scrutiny has changed over time.
In the 2010s, it seems quite clear that Zuckerberg wanted to appear socially progressive like many other tech leaders, despite the libertarianism that dominates the politics of Silicon Valley. He was outspoken on issues like immigration, even as his company helped push the opposite narrative where it was profitable, and he funded philanthropic efforts supposedly aimed at addressing those causes. That included a big donation to promote school privatization to try to distract from the release of The Social Network.
When the political pressure escalated, Zuckerberg again tried to show the company then called Facebook was responding to the criticism. But he was never willing to go far enough to really address the root of the problem, in part because he took disingenuous conservative anger at face value. If conservatives were being silenced on social media more than liberals, it was only because they were more likely to use hate speech and express bigoted views that got caught up in moderation. But the company wouldn’t accept that reality.
According to reporting in Buzzfeed News, Zuckerberg was already personally intervening to protect extreme right-wing users in 2019, including InfoWars founder Alex Jones. As one employee told the publication, “Mark personally didn’t like the punishment, so he changed the rules,” allowing a wide range of right-wing militant groups to remain on Facebook and organize for the insurrection that occurred on January 6, 2021. That event finally forced the company to take more serious action, but many of those efforts have proven shortlived.
The man helping Zuckerberg stifle moderation of right-wing accounts was Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative who was serving as vice president of global public policy. There’s little doubt that Kaplan helped shape Zuckerberg’s views and the policies the company took, and now he’ll be even more influential. Ahead of Zuckerberg’s bombshell announcement on moderation policy, Kaplan replaced Nick Clegg as president of global affairs. Kaplan has significant influence, not to mention a good relationship with Zuckerberg, but the CEO’s actions shouldn’t solely be placed at Kaplan’s feet.
Embracing the right to escape accountability
A poorly titled profile of Zuckerberg suggesting he was “done with politics” published in the New York Times in September provides good insight into some of the factors driving his political realignment. It describes Zuckerberg as being fed up with political backlash, but holding far more ire toward progressive politicians and employees at his philanthropic group than the right-wing political figures who also had him in their crosshairs.
In particular, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pushed back on employees who expected their initiative to do more in response to the killing of George Floyd and the overturning of abortion rights in the United States. Zuckerberg reportedly now sees himself as a libertarian or “classical liberal,” who abhors regulation and “far-left progressivism” like pro-Palestine campus protests, which he and Chan consider antisemitic.
Zuckerberg’s realignment toward the political right should not be a surprise. Over the past decade, he’s become the third-richest person in the world. He can also never be displaced from his position at the top of Meta because its dual-class share structure gives him a majority of the voting power. More recently, he’s embraced mixed-martial arts, which has a more conservative culture. He’s been quick to gut diversity initiatives at Meta and now claims the company needs a more “masculine energy.”
Zuckerberg has been done with the criticism and threats to his power for a while; he’s just been looking for the right path to rid himself of it. His firm paid to stoke the campaign against TikTok to take the focus off American social media, and he sees the Trump administration as an opportunity not just to get the US government off his back, but to use its remaining power to pressure other countries to back off too. His social position has made an embrace of the political right personally and commercially advantageous, and he sees conservatives are ready to embrace him as long as he’ll take corporate actions that will keep them happy.
When Zuckerberg rebranded the company as Meta in 2021, it was not just to distract people from the leaks by former employee Frances Haugen. In a short video before the Facebook Connect keynote where he laid out his vision for the metaverse, he expressed a defiant tone. He claimed that for many people, namely his critics, there will never “be a good time to focus on the future.” The real heroes in society, he claimed, were “those who are willing to stand up and say, ‘This is the future we want and I’m going to keep pushing and giving everything I’ve got to make this happen.’”
The future Zuckerberg wants is one where tech billionaires like himself can play in the gated world of suburban tech campuses and Hawaiian compounds without criticism or accountability, while telling the rest of us that toys like VR headsets and the metaverse will save their lives. It doesn’t matter that their tech ambitions are little more than scifi fantasies. Silicon Valley’s alliance with the extreme right will allow them to keep preaching how much tech will save the world for a little longer — all while they continue to degrade life for everyone.
He's always been a right winger. It wasn't even much of a secret.
It's Zuckerborg. Sadly, because of your sites need for 'email verification' I will be unsubscribing.
I am not sure why some sites require this double verification, but I cannot be bothered with it.
best and good luck