Four years ago, several influential California technologists decided that then-President Trump was a threat to democracy and banned him from posting on social media.
“We believe that the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our work at this time are too great,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his forum on January 7, 2021 – one day after Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol. a violent attempt to keep him in power.
Today, some of the same tech leaders, including Zuckerberg, are taking a markedly different tone as Trump prepares to take back the White House. They met him in person, touted the business opportunities they saw under his administration, announced policies that seemed designed to appease him and record his comeback with huge donations to his opening fund.
On Tuesday, four years to the day he wrote to announce Trump’s suspension from Facebook, Zuckerberg posted a video saying the “sophisticated systems” his company has built to measure dangerous, illegal and misleading content have led to “massive censorship” – a favorite. Trump’s argument – and it will be spectacularly reversed.
Calling the recent election a “cultural tipping point,” Zuckerberg said Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — will “remove fact-checkers” and instead rely on users to challenge misleading posts. The company will significantly reduce its content restrictions on some of Trump’s favorite political topics, such as immigration and gender, he added, and increase the amount of political content its algorithms target to users.
It would also move the remaining security and content moderation teams out of California to Texas, which Zuckerberg suggested would provide a less “biased” environment, and work directly with Trump to “push back governments around the world who are after corporate America pushing for more censorship.”
Industry experts say the changes are part of a broader shift in the political establishment of society by tech bigwigs — which began long before Trump’s win in November but has grown exponentially since then, and is bigger than the mindless bowing of business leaders who do things differently. government every four years.
Others have defended the shift. In an interview with The Associated Press last month, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff credited the incoming Trump administration with showing greater interest than the Biden administration in the industry’s problems and expertise.
“I think a lot of people realize that there are a lot of amazing people like Elon Musk in the tech industry and in the business community,” Benioff said. “If you’re tapping the energy and expertise of America’s best to do America’s best, that’s a great idea.”
Some say the change reflects a financial calculation, in keeping with a libertarian streak that has long run deep in tech circles, that Trump’s penchant for repeal and disdain for content moderation — which he says is biased against stakeholders — will be too good. rain, say experts.
Technology executives see an opportunity to wipe their hands of the expensive burden of cleaning up their platforms, experts say, and a useful excuse to do so under the guise of free speech – Trump himself often cites to ridicule the platform’s moderation. .
“It is noticeable that Trump’s power is great, as we saw in the election, that he is definitely here to stay for these four years, [and] that MAGA is the largest social organization in the United States,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, director of the UC Center for Global Digital Cultures. “When it comes to Meta and these big companies, their interest is ultimately in increasing their valuation and/or profits, and they will go with any easy means to achieve just that.”
That situation isn’t surprising and financially savvy, he and other experts say, but it’s also alarming — especially given Trump’s promises to use the Justice Department as a political weapon against his enemies and the willingness of tech leaders to fight that threat with money and more. comfort to the White House, they said.
Sarah T. Roberts, the founder and faculty director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, said the technology contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund are “a very insulting demonstration” that in order to “succeed in the market in the next four years, it will need to be approved by the president.”
The bigger problem is that the decisions by Meta, X and others to comply with Trump by discarding years of knowledge and expertise accumulated in the area of content moderation are not in the best interests of platform users around the world who are harmed when protections are not in place, said Roberts, author of “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media .”
Technology leaders know that, too, but they don’t seem to care, she said.
“They know from their internal research that there is harm without measures and intervention efforts, and they make strong decisions to ignore their evidence, to disband those groups, [and] they sold their work and employees,” said Roberts.
And at work, says Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University, is a long-standing tactic among tech giants to reshape American capitalism in their favor by gaining influence in Washington.
“They enter politics in ways that go beyond money,” he said. “They love power.”
Money and power
Zuckerberg, Elon Musk of X, Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google and other leaders of the cryptocurrency and AI industries who have supported the Trump administration platforms and services play a major role in shaping the discourse. public and political debate. , say experts.
A key test of their enormous power is government regulation, which has increased in recent years as countries grapple with the threats posed by these platforms to consumers and democracy, including the spread of misinformation and hate speech.
Individual nations and the European Union have increasingly issued content supervision and child protection orders, issued orders to take down content deemed illegal or harmful, and filed antitrust and other charges to break up or fine companies for anti-competitive business practices.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and X — formerly Twitter — have all faced antitrust charges or reviews in recent years, some of which were initiated under the Trump administration. No one responded to requests for comment, although it denied the charge in court.
They or their top executives own all of the donations to Trump’s inauguration fund, which pays for galas, parades and dinners.
Meta and Apple’s Cook said they would contribute $1 million to Trump’s fund. Google said it was donating $1 million and that the opening would be streamed on YouTube. Amazon, led by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has pledged $1 million in cash and a $1-million cash donation for streaming the opening on Amazon Video.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars — more than any single donor in the 2024 election — to help Trump and Republicans in the House and Senate, including two separate political committees, campaign. investment fair.
Musk has been in Trump’s company ever since, and Trump has nominated him to lead the new “Department of Government Operations.”
Bill Baer, the former head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in the Obama administration, said tech leaders “love kindness” — adding that it’s “not a crazy thing for them to do” given Trump’s focus on trust.
“They want to make sure that, if there is an enemy list being put together, they are not on it,” said Baer.
It’s also unclear how the Trump administration will handle the technology platforms or investigations into their operations, Baer said. Both Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance “have expressed some concerns about technology platforms,” and “there seems to be a mixed opinion among Republicans in Congress,” he said.
Baer’s concern, however, is that the Trump White House will follow through on its promises to “regulate law enforcement in a way that will allow it to protect its friends and go after its enemies, and that includes people being sued for antitrust.” as reasons for their independence, and the people who are being investigated for that behavior.”
If Trump does, the willingness of tech leaders to pay into his primary fund and appease him in other ways will raise legal questions, Baer said — especially if the charges against them are suddenly dropped, or dropped easily.
“It’s something the public should be concerned about,” Baer said. “Our entire economy is built on the idea that competition leads to innovation, price competition, quality improvement.”
‘Everybody wants to be my friend’
At a December news conference, Trump commented on the “less hostile” reception he received from tech leaders.
“The first term, everyone was fighting me. At this point, everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump said.
When asked about Meta’s announcement on Tuesday — which followed fellow Ultimate Fighting Championship executive and Trump loyalist Dana White on Meta’s board — Trump simply said Zuckerberg “went too far.”
The comments echoed Trump’s argument with other Republicans that big tech is steeped in bias and that its algorithms and content rating are designed to benefit Democrats and hurt Republicans.
Experts say there’s plenty of evidence to show the bias is a myth — not least in all the recent actions of powerful tech leaders.
But whatever the politics of those leaders, they all “came to the same conclusion” that they had to take on Trump’s ego, Roberts said.
“If that’s the price of doing business, I think they’re willing to do it — while selling out a lot of other people and putting them at risk.”
Lalka, from Tulane and author of “The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Incomes into Power,” said the fact that Trump is surrounded by tech leaders shows how much Silicon Valley has changed politically since 2016 – when financier Peter Thiel. raised eyebrows in the industry by donating $1.25 million to Trump’s primary campaign.
Lalka said that the American people do not underestimate, and should know better, the extent to which Silicon Valley types have infiltrated the government – Vance, among others, has a deep relationship with Thiel – and how much they are in permanently changing American governance to make it work better. free market interests.
Musk’s “Department of Government Operations” and related plans under Project 2025 to fire federal employees in favor of Trump loyalists are good examples, he said.
“What they are arguing here is the Silicon Valley of the idea – that is, whatever is inherited, traditional, needs to be rejected in favor of the new, novel, new, technological,” Lalka. said. “Do we have that willingness to take risks based on these people coming in? As a general public, I am not sure about that.”
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