Donald Trump couldn’t help but gloat Tuesday that he’d successfully bullied Mark Zuckerberg into making a spate of policy changes at Meta that will allow for the rampant spread of misinformation.
During a press conference, one reporter asked the president-elect whether he thought he had anything to do with Zuckerberg’s decision to supposedly recommit his social media platforms to free speech by demolishing its fact-checking system, as well as certain content filters and restrictions.
“Do you think he’s directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?” the reporter asked.
“Probably,” Trump replied.
Meta’s new policy changes comes as Trump prepares to return to the White House and make good on the threats he’s been making to Zuckerberg for months.
“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in his book Save America, which was published in August.
The president-elect had previously called out his buddy “ZUCKERBUCKS” in a July post on Truth Social, promising to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time.”
Trump’s outrage at the technocrat was in direct response to Zuckerberg’s efforts to curb Covid-19 misinformation, which Trump readily provides. Zuckerberg’s content moderation efforts were rebranded on the right as a kind of censorship, rather than a public health and safety service.
Zuckerberg has since gushed over the president-elect’s “badass” response to almost being assassinated, and donated a cool $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund through Meta.
Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that Meta’s platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would no longer have third-party fact-checkers, instead relying on X’s model of community notes, in which the mob decides the truth. Additionally, Zuckerberg said he’d remove restrictions around topics such as gender and immigration to create space for right-wing talking points and opinions that might have been silenced due to outdated concerns over the spread of dangerous misinformation or, hey, even hate speech. Zuckerberg also said he would raise the threshold for removing any problematic content to allow for a freer flow of ideas, whose quality will soon go entirely unvetted.
