Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to stay out of the political arena ahead of the upcoming U.S. presidential election come as the billionaire head of Meta Inc. seeks to appease critics such as Donald Trump. This has led to heated debate over whether this is going too far.
Mr. Zuckerberg has spent recent weeks making a public effort to demonstrate that he is above partisan lines ahead of the November polls, holding Facebook and Instagram accountable for problems for which they are not responsible. He said he had made the first “political miscalculation” since 2016 that he was responsible for.
Election experts, civic integrity groups and former officials told the Financial Times that Meta has rolled back certain election security efforts on the social network since 2020, while Zuckerberg embarked on a “year of efficiency” last year and said he was concerned about the thousands of jobs cut in Congress. Platforms are under pressure from disgruntled investors to rein in costs.
“I think this is a low-key national emergency,” said one former Meta election staffer, who questioned whether the company had the “institutional capacity” to respond to a serious election threat.
People familiar with Mr. Zuckerberg’s thinking said he was motivated by Mr. Zuckerberg’s desire to move Mr. Meta away from politics to focus on his artificial intelligence and Metaverse ambitions, and said the company’s plans for the pointed out that it is trying to reduce the amount of political content provided by.
Meanwhile, a focus on efficiency and AI has helped propel Meta’s stock price higher, with the stock up 68% this year to a record high and the company’s market capitalization at nearly $1.5 trillion. Ta. On Thursday, Zuckerberg’s net worth reached $200 billion for the first time, according to Forbes’ list of the richest people.
Former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who heads Meta’s international affairs, is now making most of the decisions on election policy, one of the people said.
“[Mark]keeps trying to make people happy, so people just leave him alone and it just doesn’t happen,” said Katie Harvath, a former policy director who worked on election strategy for Meta for 10 years. says. “On the one hand, he’s right and he’s getting blamed for things that aren’t his fault. On the other hand, if you want to make an impact, there’s going to be messiness.”
Mr. Zuckerberg’s new approach comes years in the making as he seeks to muzzle criticism from politicians and the public about meth’s impact on society and navigate internal and external disputes over how the platform should treat elections and candidates. This was achieved after much struggle.
In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the 2021 Biden administration repeatedly pressured Meta to “censor” certain COVID-19 content during the pandemic. He accused her of spending money on him. “We are ready to fight back if something like this happens again,” he said.
Zuckerberg claimed he is politically “neutral” this election cycle and aims to “not play any role or even the appearance of playing a role.”
Critics say the message appears aimed at placating Trump, noting that the Republican presidential candidate has repeatedly berated and even threatened to jail the heads of big tech companies. .
“This is more a change in his political calculations about the balance of power in Washington and who he has to appease than any fundamental reality,” said a former campaign staffer.
Another former employee who worked on the coronavirus response said the letter felt like a “slap in the face” to many who were on the team at the time, given that they were trying to save lives in an unprecedented situation. He said he felt it.
Citing Meta’s decision to allow ads denying the 2020 election results and the August shutdown of CloudTangle, which had been used for years by researchers to analyze the spread of content, Some say it has reduced transparency by pulling back from some of its misinformation efforts. platform.
According to a report by media nonprofit Free Press, Meta Inc. ranks second only to Elon in rolling back policies put in place in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections and cutting jobs relative to its size. Masked X, who turns out to be one of the worst social media offenders.
Ed Buys, CEO of Meadan, a nonprofit that builds digital literacy tools and provides some services for Meta’s WhatsApp, said that Meta is a “large-scale collaborative misinformation monitor and A trust and safety initiative that no longer supports “response programs” and instead leverages less extensive “artificial intelligence.”
“The very clear and now reasonable concern is that we’re going to have a contentious election…and that there’s going to be a coordinated effort that looks across the information environment to investigate and respond to those reports. The fact is that it doesn’t exist,” Vice said. Meta was one of the platforms used to widely spread the debunked story that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating residents’ pets.
“These are manufactured criticisms,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “Securing the 2024 U.S. election online remains one of our top priorities, and we have approximately 40,000 employees worldwide. is committed to safety and security, more than during the 2020 cycle. Our commitment to integrity continues to lead the industry.”
The platform will operate an election operations center to address potential fraud in real time during the November voting period, and will conduct independent fact-checking as part of efforts to combat viral misinformation. A program has also been introduced.
Allie Perliger, a security studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said the platform has been largely successful in eliminating extremist groups in recent years. Last month, Meta banned Russia’s Russia Segodnya (RT) from its app for “suspected foreign interference activities” shortly after the US government indicted two employees of the state media group for their alleged involvement in a disinformation campaign.
After the 2016 election, Zuckerberg became embroiled in partisan politics after it was revealed that a Russian troll farm was using the platform to run a pro-Trump disinformation campaign. He stepped up investment in election security for the 2020 election, investing $400 million in election infrastructure support through his philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
However, Mehta was accused by the left of being involved in the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and of allowing the narrative that the election was stolen to spread rapidly across his platforms.
There are growing suspicions from the right that the company is staffed by liberals and intentionally censors conservatives. Chan Zuckerberg’s investment was interpreted as a ploy by some Republicans to increase Democratic votes, and his donations were given the nickname “Zuckerbucks.” A bipartisan government committee subsequently reviewed the donations and unanimously concluded that the donations were non-political.
During the campaign, President Trump loudly criticized Zuckerberg, warning that if he was reelected in July he would “go after election fraudsters” and “send them to prison for a long time.” added to. Please stop! Zuckerbucks, watch out! ”
Separately, days later, Meta announced it was lifting restrictions that remained on Trump’s Meta account after he was suspended from the platform, adding that it was “in response to extreme and unusual circumstances.”
Mr. Zuckerberg also publicly described Mr. Trump’s response to the assassination attempt as “evil” and called on Mr. Trump to apologize after the platform mistakenly removed photos of the attack.
Trump said in a television interview that Zuckerberg told him on the phone that he would not support Democrats out of respect for him. Mehta said the founders already plan to refrain from endorsing candidates.
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Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer flanked by Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s former chief operating officer and longtime Democrat who was the company’s political face for years. Brian Rice, a former legislative aide to Democratic Sen. John Kerry, is among those handling relations with the left, and Joel Kaplan, a prominent conservative known for overseeing relations with Republicans. will continue to serve as Meta’s vice president of global policy.
Some believe that Mr. Zuckerberg may have been encouraged by Mr. Musk of X.
“By Elon Musk coming in and literally saying ‘fuck you’ to people who think Twitter shouldn’t be run the way it is, he’s dramatically raising the bar for acceptable behavior for a social media platform.” “It’s going down,” David Evan Harris said. Chancellor Public Scholar and former Metastaff at the University of California, Berkeley. “He’s giving Mark Zuckerberg a lot of permission and space to be rebellious.”
