Zuckerberg makes Meta more MAGA

Mark Zuckerberg says the US has reached a “cultural tipping point” characterised by “too much censorship” and has decided to ditch third-party fact-checking at Meta. He’s also appointed Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a Trump ally, to the Meta board and elevated Republican Joel Kaplan to head of global policy, replacing Nick Clegg.

So what? File the above under notable but not surprising. Boardrooms across the US are making MAGA hires in light of Trump 2.0, while scores of executives have descended on Mar-a-Lago to pay homage. In the last month

• companies which denounced the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, including Ford, Toyota, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, made donations to Trump’s record-breaking inauguration fund;
• Jeff Bezos’s Amazon signed a $40 million deal to buy the rights to a documentary of Melania Trump’s life story; and
• Pfizer’s Albert Bourla flew to Mar-a-Lago in an effort to counter the influence of vaccine sceptics in Trump’s new administration.

Others, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sergey Brin, preferred to court Trump discreetly over dinner. Zuckerberg’s approach is altogether more conspicuous.

Why? He’s got some making up to do. In 2021, Facebook shut down Trump’s account after January 6 for inciting violence and Republicans have griped at his wife’s political donations. Asked whether Zuckerberg was “directly responding” to threats Trump had made to him in the past, the incoming US president responded: “Probably”.

But Zuckerberg has insisted Meta is simply “getting back to its roots” in terms of free expression and there are signs that this shift is, at least partly, personal. Over the last year he’s undergone a visible rebrand, praising Trump post-assassination attempt as “badass” and ditching the geeky grey t-shirt in favour of $900,000 watches and posts of himself cagefighting shirtless.

The appointment of White, while badly received by Meta staff, is the culmination of Zuckerberg’s move towards the style and politics of the manosphere. 7 of 10 Meta’s board members are now white, male billionaires.

“Sometimes politics identifies trends before Wall Street or Madison Avenue,” says Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist and former political strategist for Mike Bloomberg. “There's a view now of like, oh, there's an opportunity to sell into young men in their 20s and 30s who are very disaffected.”

Will other companies go MAGA? Experience handling Trump is now at a premium but when his first cabinet left office its members received a frosty reception in the corporate world. Credentialed figures like transport secretary Elaine Chao, who previously served on the boards of Wells Fargo and Dole Foods, were picking up little interest with headhunters. That has changed.

• Chao now serves as a director at Kroger, Mobileye and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
• Jay Clayton, former chair of the SEC under Trump, was appointed chair of Apollo Global Management in March 2024.
• Others include John Bolton (director at NUBURU), Mark Esper (Epirus and CAES), John F. Kelly (Prestige Consumer Healthcare Inc.) and H.R. McMaster (NRx Pharma).

“Boards are very performative to begin with,” says Tusk. “People get put on boards for symbolic, narrative and optics reasons all the time. So whether that's about a commitment to a certain set of values like DEI, or whether that's a set of commitment to a political ideology like MAGA, I think this is pretty normal.”

Quid pro quos. Zuckerberg may expect Trump’s help with the following:

• Section 230. Trump could block the repeal of the law which protects platforms from being held liable for content posted by their users.
• Antitrust. Outgoing FTC chair Lina Khan has suggested Zuckerberg is seeking a “sweetheart deal” to settle a long-running case brought by her predecessor to unwind his acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
• AI. Meta will be seeking a light-touch when it comes to AI regulation, especially since California started advancing safety laws for large language models.

What’s more… Zuckerberg appears to be aping the strategy of a man who has consistently threatened to beat him up. Another leaf he’s taken out of Elon Musk’s book has been moving Meta’s content moderation teams to Texas – a place less susceptible to wildfires and onerous regulation...and less keen on content moderation.