Mark Zuckerberg Will Never Win

Mark Zuckerberg seems to enjoy playing politics. The only problem is that he doesn’t appear to be any good at it.

This week, the Meta CEO wrote a letter to Representative Jim Jordan in response to an inquiry about Meta’s content-moderation policies. Jordan, an Ohio Republican, and the House Judiciary Committee have been investigating supposed collusion between President Joe Biden’s administration and technology companies to censor free speech online. In his letter addressing these concerns, Zuckerberg wrote that in 2021, senior White House officials “repeatedly pressured” Meta to censor content related to COVID-19, “including humor and satire.” He also noted a separate instance from October 2020, when Meta temporarily demoted a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after initial guidance from the FBI that there may have been a Russian disinformation campaign about the Biden family in the lead-up to that year’s presidential election. In the letter, Zuckerberg notes that the article turned out not to be part of such an operation, and that “we shouldn’t have demoted the story.” Zuckerberg also made it clear that Meta was not forced to remove any material: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down,” he wrote.

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Jordan and the House Judiciary treated the letter as a revelatory confessional, despite the fact that it has been widely reported that Meta sparred with the Biden administration  over COVID-19 misinformation-takedown requests. (Internal Meta correspondence was published in The Wall Street Journal and was also a key component of a recent Supreme Court case concerning the federal government intervening in social-media-moderation decisions.) Similarly, Zuckerberg and Meta previously expressed regret about the laptop story and the decision to suppress it.

Regardless, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee took a victory lap, posting on X that “Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big win for free speech.” Donald Trump also weighed in on his Truth Social account, saying “Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED.” It’s worth noting that the wording of Trump’s post suggests that his own White House rigged the election against himself (Trump, it seems, either did not read the letter or is confused about when exactly he was president).

There are numerous reasons Zuckerberg might have felt compelled to humor Jordan and his committee. It is a presidential-election year, and the contest between Trump and Kamala Harris remains a toss-up. Zuckerberg and Meta may be trying to ease GOP concerns in the event Trump wins power. The fact that the letter repackages older admissions suggests that Zuckerberg may be trying to placate Jordan; as former Facebook employee Katie Harbath suggested this week, the letter may have been part of “a negotiation with Jordan and the committee to avoid any sort of hearings this Fall.” Regardless of the specific intentions, it’s clear that Meta and Zuckerberg want to stay out of the 2024-election news cycle—and that they don’t want voters to think Facebook is manipulating what they see (Zuckerberg noted in July, just before Biden dropped out, that he will not be endorsing either political candidate this election cycle).

But the letter actually does not represent a pivot for the CEO, who has previously made it clear that he does not want to assert editorial control over news content on his platform. “We don’t want to assess by ourselves which sources are trustworthy,” Zuckerberg said on a 2018 earnings call. “I think that’s not a situation that or a position that we’re comfortable with ourselves. I don’t think personally that that’s something that our community or our society wants us to do.” It’s a naive stance—the design and implementation of Facebook’s promotional algorithms are fundamentally choices about the type of content that users see—but, from Zuckerberg’s standpoint, it makes sense. Asserting that your social-media platform makes editorial decisions by algorithmically boosting content into peoples’ feeds opens Zuckerberg and Meta up to political scrutiny that they do not want.

[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

Political news, in the eyes of Facebook, is a messy, subjective business. Which is why it’s notable that in early 2020, as the pandemic shut down cities across the world, Zuckerberg and Meta worked hard to make sure that factual medical information and news about COVID-19 reached users’ feeds and that stricter policies were in place to block clear misinformation. “When you’re dealing with a pandemic, a lot of the stuff we’re seeing just crossed the threshold,” he told the New York Times in March 2020. “It's easier to set policies that are a little more black and white and take a much harder line.” As the Times story also noted, Zuckerberg’s neutrality philosophy was tested by the pandemic, where the “difference between good and bad information is clearer in a medical crisis than in the world of, say, politics.” What Zuckerberg didn’t anticipate is that the very information that felt “black and white” in the pandemic’s earliest days would quickly be politicized and weaponized. Editorial decisions and moderation policies that seemed clear-cut when people were banging pots and pans on their balconies to honor health-care workers became polarizing decisions in the face of a right-wing anti-vaccine movement.

A cynical reading of the letter is that Zuckerberg seems frustrated that Meta didn’t just let COVID misinformation run rampant in the early days of the Biden administration. A different interpretation is that Zuckerberg is haunted by hindsight. Decisions that seemed rational in 2020 and 2021 may seem irrational to him today—the product of a kind of pandemic anxiety. Yet another way to read his comments is that Meta is happy to make editorial decisions, provided they are popular, but will capitulate as soon as they’re viewed as political. It’s a not-so-tacit admission that a politicized “working the refs” campaign will work on him and his company.

Zuckerberg is trying to play a political game, particularly with the Republican lawmakers who have made life difficult for Meta with a years-long campaign decrying liberal tech censorship and shadowbanning. But Zuckerberg’s admissions will do little to curry favor for him among the GOP, because he is an easy scapegoat for Trump and other MAGA elites. And even if Zuckerberg were to make some Muskian right-wing pivot, support for him would still be contingent on him continuing to use Meta to support the right-wing political project. Zuckerberg’s letter gave Jordan and Trump exactly what they wanted, and they’re still slamming him.

As if to drive the point home further, on Wednesday, just two days after Zuckerberg sent his conciliatory letter, Politico reported that Donald Trump lambastes the tech CEO in a forthcoming book, suggesting that a $420 million donation Zuckerberg made in 2020 to a nonpartisan election-infrastructure project was “​​a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” Trump reportedly goes on, offering a not-so-veiled threat in the style of one of his social-media posts: “He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” he wrote. “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.”

As with any Trump post, it’s impossible to know whether the former president’s words are hollow bluster or a statement of intent. But one thing is clear: Zuckerberg is playing a dangerous political game that he will never win.