Zuckerberg’s MAGA turn insulates Meta for a while. But the business has bigger problems

Four years ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg banned Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram, saying the risks of allowing him on the platforms were “simply too great” after Trump repeatedly used the sites to broadcast election lies and cheer on the January 6 mob.

A lot’s changed.

Now, Zuckerberg is making it crystal clear that Meta and MAGA can get along.

The social media giant is canning its fact-checkers and making its platforms look a little more like X, the site owned by “first buddy” Elon Musk. At the same time, Meta named Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White to its board of directors on Monday, days after elevating Joel Kaplan, the most prominent Republican lobbyist for the company, to be its new head of global affairs. Meta was one of several large tech companies to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And Zuckerberg — whom Trump once threatened with life in prison — has personally made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to dine with the incoming president since the election.

While Zuckerberg is clearly trying to insulate Meta from Trump’s looming corporate retribution tour, he’s also courting a potential disaster if Meta’s advertisers flee and users begin to associate the brand — already tarnished by AI slop and a yearslong dearth of innovation — with the kinds of unsavory characters who now dominate X.

On Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg tapped the president-elect’s favorite TV channel, Fox News, to announce that the world’s dominant social media platforms are now, for all intents and purposes, pro-Trump.

Meta is getting rid of its third-party fact-checkers, Zuckerberg said, because they have been “too politically biased,” made too many mistakes “and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created” — unfalsifiable statements that echo the right’s longtime claim that Facebook censors conservative views. Meta will replace fact-checkers with “community notes” similar to those on X, in which users can add comments to posts that may contain false information.

The hits kept coming on Tuesday, as my colleague Clare Duffy reported that Meta quietly updated its guidelines to free users who want to refer to gay and transgender people as having a “mental illness,” or refer to women as “household objects” and “property.”

All of this buys Meta some insurance going into an era of Trump 2.0. As business leaders remember all too well from Round One, Trump has shown little restraint when he senses companies are being insufficiently loyal. Meta’s own stock tumbled in March after Trump called in to CNBC to label Facebook an “enemy of the people.”

If Meta were to take the harder line it invoked four years ago, it could expect to find itself in Trump’s crosshairs on social media and shut out of the rooms where rivals like Musk are making decisions about tech’s future.

But Meta’s repositioning is hardly a foolproof business plan. Just take a look at X, the site Musk acquired in 2022 when it was called Twitter. Musk remade the site in his own image, reinstating White nationalists and other offensive accounts that had been banned under Twitter’s safety guidelines. Advertisers, wary of their products appearing alongside hate speech, rushed to the exits. Millions of users, similarly unhappy about the return of neo-Nazis on the platform, also left for competitors like Bluesky and Meta’s Threads.

X’s value has cratered 80% since Musk bought it, according to estimates from investment giant Fidelity.

That’s not a huge problem for X and Musk, who could theoretically bankroll the entire operation himself.

The same can’t be said for Meta, one of the world’s most valuable public companies, with a market cap of $1.5 trillion.

“Brand safety remains a key factor in determining where advertisers spend their budgets,” Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said in an email Tuesday. “Social media is already a minefield for content that many brands deem unsafe, and Meta’s change could exacerbate those problems.”

Even a slight dropoff in engagement could hurt the business, Enberg said.

We’ve seen it before.

In 2022, Meta lost nearly $240 billion in market value in a single day — the biggest one-day drop in company value in the history of the US stock market at the time — after it reported a slight decline in daily active Facebook users and an 8% drop in quarterly profit.

That hits Zuckerberg where he lives, because he’s the biggest individual shareholder, says Cory Doctorow, a journalist, author and activist with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. But more importantly, stock swings hit the rich-but-not-billionaire-rich class of Meta executives.

“Zuckerberg is insulated from the consequences of making bad choices until he’s not — until things reach a breaking point… and then he tends to panic,” Doctorow told me. “Tech calls these panics ‘pivots,’ but they’re just the outcome of being the CEO of a company that posts anemic growth or even a contraction and sees the Street just go nuts on you.”

Past “pivots” have included the Metaverse, the sci-fi nonsense that Zuckerberg pitched as the future of the company three years ago. More recently, Meta is testing out its own AI-generated “users” in an apparent ploy to goose engagement.

“They’re now at the end of a long run of extremely bad choices,” Doctorow said. Which is not to say Meta is doomed, per se. “But I think that they are on the path to becoming a kind of zombie — like MySpace is today. MySpace still exists. It’s just AI-generated slop and spam.”