Meta’s MAGA heel turn is about much more than Trump

In today’s episode of Decryptionwe delve into a particularly messy set of ideas. It’s been a chaotic couple of weeks for Big Tech, as the second Trump administration ushers in an unprecedented era in how we think about who controls the internet. dead Changed its rules To openly allow more insults and hate speech on its platforms, TikTok has been banned and Kind of unblockedA group of technology CEOs attended Trump’s second inauguration.

There’s a major collision, or perhaps merging, happening right now between the power of billionaires and the power of the state and everyone who uses technology to communicate – so, basically… everyone – Which means everyone else is also stuck in the middle.

I invited Kate Klonick, an attorney and associate professor at St. John’s University School of Law, to try to help me work through the different ways the Trump administration is dealing with companies like Meta and TikTok — and the very concept of free speech. connected. As you might have guessed, there are a lot of inconsistencies. But the one thing that unites all this chaos is the size of these companies and how they have drawn the Trump administration into some major geopolitical battles.

Kate has just returned to the United States after spending more than a year in Europe studying how those countries think about the Internet, and she has a lot of insights into how these geopolitical conflicts are shaping the present and future of online discourse and the Internet itself. These battles are having a real impact on how ordinary people experience these platforms.

Just a few weeks ago, it was Mark Zuckerberg He made a big announcement About changing content moderation on Meta platforms — it’s doing away with fact checking in favor of mass community feedback, and its new terms of service allow for a slew of bigoted and transphobic content that was at least nominally against the rules.

You could read this as Zuck’s MAGA heel turn, and his new haircut certainly suggests a man approaching middle age trying to regain the confidence of youth. But these moves are also international in scope: the EU Digital Services Act It imposes some potentially very heavy and expensive regulations On social media platforms, and if Trump likes Zuckerberg and Facebook enough, perhaps he will fight Europe on Meta’s behalf.

We don’t need to guess this, as this is very much what Zuckerberg himself represents Saying he wants out of Trump. Quite frankly, Zuckerberg is Transphobia For a new kind of trade war.

This kind of deal-and-deal will determine how tech companies deal with Trump 2.0 — here at edge, We call it guerrilla technology organizing, and there’s a lot to explain. There is also, frankly, the Trumpism of it all — a theory of power that is entirely focused on results and pays no attention to the legitimacy or fairness of the process that arrives at those results, creating enormous opportunities for open corruption and corruption. Okay, you disgusting dictator.

That’s what we saw this week with the TikTok ban, another casualty of the geopolitical war to control freedom of expression online. Congress passed a law banning TikTok unless the app is stripped of Chinese control, but Trump decided to simply ignore that law for political gain, even though ignoring the law carries such huge penalties that Apple and Google don’t risk it. TikTok’s return to their app stores.

And now Trump says He will force a sale And he wants The US government will own 50% of TikTokan idea so problematic that Kate and I found it difficult to even list all the First Amendment problems it might cause.

If you’d like to read more about the stories and topics we discussed in this episode, check out the links below:

• Welcome to the era of guerrilla technology regulation Edge
• Trump signs order refusing to impose a 75-day TikTok ban | Edge
• Inside Zuckerberg’s Race to Reshape Meta for the Age of Trump | New York Times
• The future of the Internet looks bleaker by the day | Wired
• Meta highlights the divided global approach to online discourse | Edge
• Mark Zuckerberg lies about content moderation to Joe Rogan’s face | Edge
• The “tipping point” in Meta is about aligning with the Force The Washington Post
• Meta prepares for an authoritarian future Technology Policy Press
• Meta surrenders to the right to speak Platform
• We’re all trying to find the guy who did this Atlantic