Sometimes I almost feel sorry for Mark Zuckerberg. I know, I know. He’s the fourth-richest person in the world, and the social-media platforms he controls have blighted the childhoods of millions of teenage girls and helped turn the rest of us into phone-addicted zombies. Despite all that, I occasionally I feel a faint—okay, very faint—twinge of sympathy over the way the tech mogul’s life has devolved into an endless apology tour. In his latest mea culpa, issued just before Labor Day weekend, Zuckerberg expressed regret for how his company had caved to government demands to censor certain types of content flowing through its channels. His contrition sounds authentic, but I’m withholding judgement.
When I step back a bit, I can see that Zuckerberg isn’t just haplessly begging our forgiveness. He’s trying to save his business. Meta Platforms, the company he controls, contains some of the world’s most widely used and profitable digital brands, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta appears to be thriving, with its stock price more than quadrupling since a rocky 2022. But Zuckerberg knows that his company’s brands are built on foundations of sand. Just as a sandbar will move with tides, the user base of any social platform can drift away in a surprisingly short time.
Case in point: While Facebook has begun to plateau in recent years (especially among the young), TikTok has surged to over 1 billion active users worldwide, with 170 million embracing the app in the United States. And those American users spend close to an hour a day on the China-controlled platform. Facebook, by comparison, increasingly looks like the Buick of social-media brands: something your grandmother drives.
Worse, it seems that much of the world is turning against the whole idea of independent social-media companies making their own decisions about what content to allow on their platforms. The European Union has been working to clip the wings of the social-media giants for years. Brazil’s left-wing government recently barred Elon Musk’s X from operating in the country after Musk refused to ban opponents of the ruling party from the platform. In August, French police arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the immensely popular text-messaging app Telegram. His crime, authorities said, was allowing “illegal transactions” to be conducted over the encrypted service. In the Free Press, media analyst Andrey Mir describes this as part of a larger historical trend. The early digital revolution disrupted the influence that governments and other institutions once had over the flow of information. Now they want to reassert control, Mir writes: “The Durov arrest signals that the state is tightening its grip.”
Many American politicians appear eager to do something similar here. In 2019, then-vice-presiden-tial candidate Kamala Harris complained to CNN’s Jake Tapper that social-media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” She openly and repeatedly lobbied Twitter’s then–CEO Jack Dorsey to shut down President Trump’s account (something Twitter eventually did). Harris’s running mate shows a similar mindset, arguing that even the First Amendment goes only so far. “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told MSNBC in 2022.
Let’s hope Walz, a former high-school teacher, never taught civics.
Mark Zuckerberg may be a socially awkward nerd, but he can read the room. And the room is telling him that pretty much everyone hates social-media companies. Democratic politicians hate the fact that these platforms allow unwashed nobodies to challenge liberal orthodoxies about topics from Covid to climate to gender issues. And Republicans have long complained—with justification—that the tech giants suppress conservative views. No matter which party wins the White House, the next administration could well push for policies that would eviscerate Meta’s enterprises. Trump often brags that, if reelected, he will use the power of the federal government to punish his enemies. The Biden administration seems to be doing exactly this today, though without Trump’s public swagger. Since Elon Musk loosened speech controls on X and publicly embraced some conservative issues, half a dozen federal agencies have taken regulatory actions seemingly designed to hobble his various businesses.
Zuckerberg knows that for Meta to survive, it must navigate this political Scylla and Charybdis. For years, Facebook was a reliable ally for Democrats. But after Trump’s election in 2016, many on the left blamed the platform for giving the insurgent candidate a digital leg up. That suspicion ultimately led to two days of contentious congressional hearings in 2018. Eschewing his trademark hoodie for what the New York Times called his “‘I’m sorry’ suit,” Zuckerberg faced 600 hostile questions from Democrats and Republicans alike. (Setting a pattern, the House Republicans tended to complain that Facebook censors too much content; the Democrats worried that it wasn’t censoring enough.) The dartboard CEO has been back to Capitol Hill several times since, having learned along the way that he can’t afford to alienate either party.
Zuckerberg’s latest apology is aimed at reassuring critics on the right. Perhaps he is hedging his bets in the event that Trump wins back the White House. Perhaps he genuinely regrets giving federal nannies control over his company’s core decisions. Perhaps a little of both.
Let’s go to the text: “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, a longtime Facebook critic. Here Zuckerberg is acknowledging something that was a well-kept secret until late 2022. That was when Musk acquired Twitter and started releasing internal communications between that company’s Trust and Safety department and various meddling administration officials. Those “Twitter Files” disclosures triggered other revelations of similar conversations between various federal agencies—notably the FBI and CDC—and key digital platforms including Google and Facebook.
Zuckerberg suggests that the relationship was prickly, noting that the White House “expressed a lot of frustration” when Facebook didn’t respond as ordered. From other sources, we know that the White House pressure was intense. For example, the discovery process in the Missouri v. Biden case uncovered a July 15, 2021, email from Rob Flaherty, a Biden deputy assistant, to his contact at Facebook. The White House official was outraged that material he considered misinformation was still appearing on the platform. “Are you guys f—ing serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today,” Flaherty wrote. (Flaherty is now Kamala Harris’s deputy campaign manager.) The White House’s pressure campaign wasn’t conducted only behind the scenes. The day after Flaherty sent his email, President Biden blurted to reporters that Facebook was “killing people” by giving vaccine skeptics a platform.
The administration didn’t just go after obviously erroneous information (not to say that policing media accuracy ought to be the government’s job in any case). The pandemic allowed government and academic busybodies to use claims of misinformation as tools to suppress all sorts of opinions they disagreed with. And some social-media channels seemed all too eager get on board, whether they were pressured or not. YouTube, for example, removed the video of a panel discussion hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and featuring Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and other scientists skeptical of lockdowns and the masking of schoolchildren. A YouTube spokesperson said the takedown was necessary “to support the health and safety of our users.” A consensus was growing that certain ideas are like contagious illnesses that need to be quarantined away from the public. For our own good, of course.
For wannabe censors inside and outside government, that information-as-contagion model doesn’t just apply to medical topics. Zuckerberg’s letter also describes how, in 2020, the FBI warned Facebook that Russian hackers might try to sway the U.S. presidential election (as it had supposedly attempted to do in 2016). When the New York Post broke the story of Hunter Biden’s scandal-dripping laptop in October of that year, Meta immediately deep-sixed the article, as did most other social-media channels and mainstream media outlets, in response to claims that the laptop itself was the vehicle for a Russian plot. “It has since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg writes. At the time, of course, the media establishment happily slow-walked any efforts to confirm the Post’s reporting until long after the election.
Today, Zuckerberg says he’s sorry his company caved to government interference. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we would not make today,” he writes. He vows to keep Meta more independent: “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction—and we are ready to push back if something like this happens.”
But will Meta be able to push back? Government officials have long leaned on media outlets to tilt news coverage in their favor. (When those officials are Democrats, they don’t have to lean very hard.) Today’s pressure is different. On a recent episode of the Honestly podcast, Matt Taibbi—one of the journalists who broke the Twitter Files story—notes that today’s government censors “are bypassing the media and going straight to the distributor.” They might not be able to stop a newspaper from publishing a story they don’t like, but they can pressure social-media platforms not to let users share it. That’s just as effective and leaves fewer fingerprints. It will be hard for Meta and other companies to reverse this dynamic. “These companies have already surrendered and let the government in,” Taibbi notes. “They will really have to fight to regain their independence.”
Government censors don’t have a lot of leverage over traditional media outlets. But social-media platforms are vulnerable to one very tangible threat: removing what is known as Section 230 protection. Under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, websites are not held legally liable for content on their sites that is produced by outside parties. This means that, whereas a newspaper can be sued if it publishes libels about someone, a social-media platform is more like a phone company: It’s not legally responsible for what people say over its channels. That freedom from lawsuits is part of what enables such freewheeling discourse on these platforms. It also annoys the hell out of some politicians—especially Democrats—who believe that many of these conversations should be labeled as misinformation, disinformation, or hate speech and scrubbed from the Internet. Biden, for one, has long advocated doing away with Section 230 protection for social-media companies.
During the period of peak Covid paranoia, while some administration officials were privately strong-arming social platforms to censor content, other Biden staffers publicly mused about revoking Section 230. In 2022, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield whether the administration would consider ditching Section 230 for digital platforms. “We’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable,” Bedingfield responded. She might as well have added, “Nice little social-media business ya got here…”
Many Republicans, including Trump and vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, also favor scrapping Section 230. I understand conservative frustration with how the dominant social platforms seem to favor liberal views (at least until Musk’s Twitter takeover). And as a journalist, it galls me that Facebook and others make a fortune distributing content created by hardworking reporters while remaining immune to the rules and risks journalistic outlets have to live by. Still, be careful what you wish for. Repealing Section 230 wouldn’t bring political balance back to the digital sphere. It would probably make left-wing bias worse. Why do you think so many Democrats support the idea?
In Reason, Robby Soave writes, “Democrats understand that the rise of social media has been a positive development for conservative, independent, libertarian, contrarian, and alternative media ecosystems; the swiftest way to destroy these ecosystems would be to deprive the platforms of their legal shield.” I think that’s the correct take. Even despite some anti-right manipulation, today’s social platforms give conservatives powerful ways to spread ideas and challenge leftist narratives. So, as much as I would like to see Section 230 tweaked to balance the economic playing field with traditional publishers, I don’t trust Congress to get the formula right. And as bad as the social-media landscape might be today, our political leaders could always make it worse.
Zuckerberg may be sincere about reclaiming his company’s editorial independence. Or he might simply be trying to steer the Meta dreadnought past a political whirlpool. Either way he is saying the right things, and that’s a start.
Photo: Mandel Ngan/Pool via AP
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