About-Face(book)
My 10th and final prediction for 2025 was that Mark Zuckerberg was due for a reckoning in the press after a year or so of fawning over the "Zuckaissance".
It took a week.1
Techmeme right now is utterly dominated by the backlash against Zuck – and already some backlash to the backlash – for his change in stance on content moderation. And this is in the middle of CES. With Jensen Huang busting out GPU wafer shields on stage like some sort of AI superhero. Unless someone leaves a prototype iPhone in a bar tomorrow – and even then, it probably needs to be foldable and transparent and made of Adamantium – nothing is derailing this story for a while.
It's just a perfect storm: Zuckerberg + Zuckaissance + Speech + Trump = Kaboom.
So what else is there to say when pretty much every angle was instantly covered? Not much, to be honest. But come on, that's no fun. This is the internet, takes must be given. So I'll try to follow my own mandate and take a step back to think this through while being a step removed.
Facebook as a company, before it was Meta, almost perfectly mirrors my own time in tech. It was founded in 2004, the year I graduated from college and started blogging about technology. When I started doing that professionally in 2007, Google was already well-established as a public company, but Facebook was the startup upstart on the rise and well on its way to being that next "internet treasure" and the crown jewel of the "third wave" to borrow phrases from John Doerr. When I started working at TechCrunch, our office was two blocks away from Facebook's in Palo Alto. That was fun at times, awkward at others, and quite combative.
Anyway, I've been writing about the company for a long time. I've met Mark Zuckerberg a handful of times, but know many people that know him well. With all that context, my sense here is that what we're seeing now is closer to the "real" Mark Zuckerberg than previous stances he's taken on issues.
That is to say, he's not completely full of shit in his about-face on content moderation and free speech. His own video on the matter kicks off by citing a speech he gave five years ago at Georgetown on such topics – a point which his team has been trumpeting today. It's an effort to make him seem less two-faced, of course. But again, I don't think it's necessarily misleading. It can be both convenient and also true.
But there are other truths too. Certainly, the timing of all of this is interesting. Which is to say, also undoubtedly not coincidental. He's reversing Meta's course on the eve of the inauguration of a President who has threatened both him personally and his company due to the very issues that Zuckerberg is now backtracking on. Talk about convenient! And this follows a love bombing campaign to prove to the incoming "badass" President that this time, things will be different.
And it's working. Meta has "come a long way," according to Trump in a public speech given yesterday.
But Zuckerberg also can't afford – perhaps quite literally – to let up. The incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr has made it quite clear that Meta is enemy number one when it comes to his agenda around free speech and censorship. This, more so than Trump himself, is probably driving the timing of all of this. And that, in turn, is likely what led to the replacing of Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan right now. Out with the liberal head, in with the conservative one.
So yes, the stance can be both true and political at the same time. In fact, you could argue that it was savvy, in a way, for Zuckerberg to wait to play this chip until he would get the most bang for the buck, as it were. Certainly that will help to ease the pain of the blowback in the press here, which was always going to be inevitable with such a change in stance.
To that end, it does feel like Zuckerberg is also learning lessons from his would-be cage match adversary, Elon Musk. He's been at war with the press for a few years now. Has it mattered? I mean, he's now the richest man in the world – by far – and the right hand man to the incoming President. So, no. I'm sorry, but that must be the takeaway here – certainly the one Zuckerberg is looking at in all of this. He sees what Elon is doing and has done and is clearly realizing that he needs to stop giving so much of a shit what others think – and certainly what the press thinks.
The fact that he specifically cited "X" and what they've been doing with the Community Notes feature in his video yesterday was certainly a tactic as well. Sure, part of it was to mute any copying blowback by stating the obvious, but it was also a subtle signal to Musk and his overall strategy.
Again, two things can be true: Zuckerberg is now going to copy that strategy, but he also probably always wanted to implement such a strategy. He just didn't have the courage to do so before. Now Elon has given him cover.
All of this reads a bit unfair to Zuckerberg. People do change and grow over time, of course. He started Facebook when he was 19. He's now 40. That's arguably the period of time when you're going to do the most changing and growing. Most simply don't do it in the public eye, in real time as much as Zuckerberg has. And unlike, say, a celebrity, his goal wasn't to be well-known and followed in public. But that naturally came when he built products that touched the lives of 3 billion-plus people. It's perhaps not a stretch to think that he's better known around the world than any Hollywood figure. Perhaps only a few athletes are more well-known. And maybe Musk.
Anyway, this is me giving some benefit of the doubt.2 Because things are undoubtedly not as black-and-white as they're being portrayed today. This change can be both honest and also political. And, knowing Meta, it's likely to change again! This is a company with a history of whiplash-inducing policy and product changes over these past 20 years. Some of it is Zuckerberg needing to mature, some of it is him maturing. Some of it is reading the room, some of it is a complete and utter inability to.3 A lot of it is just pure old-fashioned finger-in-the-wind stuff.
That's the thing here. The only real certainty is that the political winds will shift again. And while we can joke about Emperor Trump eventually handing over the sceptre to Don Jr, the reality is that this most recent Trump election is a moment in time that is likely to lead to a complete and utter rebuke of such a time. Maybe that's in four years. Maybe it's later. But it will happen.
And so where is Mark Zuckerberg and Meta at that point? If you believe, as I do, that with all of this we're getting closer to the "real" Mark Zuckerberg, what happens when a super liberal tide is swelling? That's the real question here.
1 To be clear, I'm not really passing any judgement on either Zuckerberg or the press here, I've seen enough in my two decades observing, writing about, and investing in this industry to know how such cycles work. They're like clockwork. I didn't know what exactly would cause the backlash because I didn't need to know. You're built up to be knocked down. And you ride high on your own supply long enough in that time only to do something likely to get you knocked down.
2 To give less, I would just point out that the support of this incoming President in particular is problematic and unlikely to be looked upon kindly by history. But hey, I don't run a trillion-dollar public company and don't need to make such calculations in my stances. Will kissing the ring pay off? Perhaps literally, but probably not figureatively.
3 Remember the "smog jog" in Beijing?