Is Mark Zuckerberg becoming a mini-Elon Musk?

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta—the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—will be forswearing its traditional approach to content moderation. In its place, Meta will rely on X-style Community Notes, where rank-and-file users can attach comments to individual posts to provide corrections or clarifications, going forward.

The decision was part of a wider one to redress issues with Meta’s content moderation, Zuckerberg said in a video published on his personal Facebook page. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said, claiming that Meta’s current rules around discussion of immigration and gender were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

The decision came as a shock to many as Meta had long been seen as one of the best among a relatively bad bunch of tech companies when it comes to content moderation efforts thanks in large part to a 40,000-person moderation staff (although those efforts have yielded mixed results). 

It’s also the latest indication that Zuckerberg is trying to buddy up to incoming president Donald Trump, and is in that respect becoming more like Trump’s current right-hand man in tech: Elon Musk.

Zuckerberg said in his video on Tuesday he would be working with Trump, to whose inauguration fund he donated $1 million, “to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” The content moderation announcement comes days after he replaced his centrist global affairs chief Nick Clegg with Republican Joel Kaplan, and installed Trump acolyte Dana White to Meta’s board.

“Zuckerberg is clearly concerned that his position as the most important and influential social media tech bro has been weakened in recent years,” says Steven Buckley, a U.S. politics and social media researcher at City, University of London. “Elon Musk has clearly taken that mantle ever since his relationship with Trump blossomed late last year.”

Given Musk’s tight relationship with Trump, it seems prudent for Zuckerberg to try and cozy up to the president-elect. Doing so could help insulate Meta from any decisions that could negatively impact the company during Trump’s second term—say, by imposing strong antitrust action or lodging complaints about what Meta chooses to prioritize on its large platforms. “It’s difficult to determine if Zuckerberg actually supports Trump and his tech policies or if this is a purely cynical move by him in order to get close to power and have some say over the direction of policy in the coming administration,” says Buckley.

That’s particularly important given Zuckerberg and Musk are competitors across a number of sectors, most notably social media and AI. Zuckerberg “clearly feels worried that if he is not in the room where decisions about policy around AI are being made, then he and Meta will be left behind,” says Buckley. “His warm rhetoric and financial donations are simply ways of him trying to curry favour with the new administration and also to subdue any future criticism he may receive from members of the Republican party.”

But because of Meta’s size—it has 3.3 billion daily users across its suite of apps, according to its latest public filing—any decision that Zuckerberg takes to try and improve his standing in the political discourse can have an outsized impact on social media, and on society more generally. (Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“This is a huge risk for the company,” says Liam McLoughlin, a content moderation researcher at Liverpool University. “If Facebook and Instagram goes the way of X, we will see a devaluation of the utility of the platform from the perspective of users as people will see an increase in spam, and egregious content.” And McLoughlin cautions that users won’t have endless patience with Zuckerberg’s new approach: “They won’t forgive their feed becoming a sea of political slop or an increase in shocking content—even if this content comes with a flag.”

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