Can Mark Zuckerberg rise above the political fray?

Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to avoid being drawn into the political arena ahead of the upcoming US presidential election is leading to a fierce debate over whether Meta’s billionaire chief has gone too far to placate critics. critics like Donald Trump or not.

Zuckerberg has spent recent weeks making public efforts to show that he is above the partisan conflict ahead of November’s polls, saying he has made “political miscalculations” since then. since 2016 when it accepted responsibility for issues for which Facebook and Instagram were not responsible.

Election experts, civic integrity groups and former staffers told the Financial Times they are concerned Meta has canceled several social media election safety initiatives since 2020, while Zuckerberg last year embarked on a “year of efficiency,” cutting thousands of jobs at the platform under pressure from disgruntled investors to limit costs.

“I think this is a mild national emergency,” said a former election worker at Meta. This person questioned whether the company has the “institutional capacity” to respond to major election threats.

Several people familiar with Zuckerberg’s thinking said he was driven by a desire to distance Meta from politics to focus on artificial intelligence and his metaverse ambitions, noting that as of 2020, the company has sought to reduce the amount of political content served up by its algorithms.

Meanwhile, a focus on efficiency and AI has helped boost Meta’s stock price, which has surged 68% this year to an all-time high, giving the company a market capitalization of nearly 1.5 million. trillion USD. Zuckerberg’s net worth hit $200 billion for the first time on Thursday, according to Forbes’ Billionaires List.

Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister who heads Meta’s global affairs, now makes the majority of election policy decisions, one person said.

“[Mark] Keep trying to make everyone happy so they leave him alone and it won’t happen,” said Katie Harbath, a former policy director who worked on Meta’s election strategy for a decade. . “On one hand he is right, he is blamed for things that are not his fault. On the other hand, if you want impact it has to come with chaos.”

Zuckerberg’s new approach comes after years of efforts to stave off criticism from politicians and the public about Meta’s impact on society, while navigating internal and external battles about how the platform handles elections and candidates.

In a letter to the Republican-led House judiciary committee in August, Zuckerberg accused the Biden administration in 2021 of repeatedly pressuring Meta to “censor” some Covid-19 content during the pandemic. He said he was “ready to react if the same thing happens again.”

Zuckerberg insists he aims to be politically “neutral” in this election cycle and “not play a role one way or another — or even appear to be playing a role.” there”.

Critics said the message appeared designed to placate Trump, noting that the Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly criticized — and even threatened to jail — the leader Big Tech.

“This is more a shift in his political calculus about the balance of power in Washington and who he has to appease, rather than any underlying reality,” the former election worker said. .

Another former employee who worked on the Covid effort said many people who were part of the team at the time felt the letter was “a slap in the face,” as they were trying to save lives in unprecedented circumstances. Have.

Others say Meta has backed away from some of its disinformation and reduced transparency efforts, citing its decision to allow ads denying the results of the 2020 election and the closure of CrowdTangle in August, a tool long used by researchers to analyze how content spreads on the platform.

A report by the nonprofit media organization Free Press found that Meta had one of the worst social media offenders when it comes to going against policies they adopted for the 2022 midterm elections and cutting jobs relative to the size of the company, second only to Elon Musk’s X.

Ed Bice, chief executive of the nonprofit Meedan, which builds digital literacy tools and provides some services for Meta’s WhatsApp, said Meta no longer supports “programs large-scale collaborative disinformation monitoring and response program this year,” focusing instead on less expansive “safe and trustworthy work based on artificial intelligence.”

“The very clear, present and reasonable concern is that we will have a contentious election. . . and the fact that we did not make a concerted effort to understand the full landscape of information to investigate and respond to those reports,” Bice said. Meta was one of the platforms used to widely spread debunked stories that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating residents’ pets.

“These are fabricated criticisms,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. Helping protect the 2024 US election online remains one of our top priorities, and we have about 40,000 people globally working on safety and security — more than we have. included in the 2020 cycle. Our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry.”

The platform will run its Election Operations Center during the November vote to address potential abuse in real time and also have an independent fact-checking program as part of the effort Address the spread of misinformation.

Arie Perliger, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, noted that the platform has been largely successful in purging extremist groups in recent years. Meta last month banned Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya, or RT, from its apps “for foreign interference” shortly after the U.S. government indicted two employees of the state-backed media conglomerate accused of engaging in a disinformation campaign.

Zuckerberg became embroiled in partisan politics following the 2016 election after it emerged that a Russian troll farm had used the platform for a pro-Trump disinformation campaign. He increased investments in election security ahead of the 2020 election and invested $400 million to support election infrastructure through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropic group.

However, Meta is blamed by the left for playing a role in the violent insurrection of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, allegedly allowing the narrative that the election was rigged The theft quickly spread throughout the platform.

From the right, he faced growing accusations that the company was staffed with liberals and intentionally censored conservatives. His investment in Chan Zuckerberg was interpreted by some Republicans as a plot to boost the Democratic vote, earning the donation the nickname “Zuckerbucks.” A bipartisan government commission later reviewed the donations and unanimously concluded that they were nonpolitical.

During this election cycle, Trump has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg, warning in July that if re-elected president, he would “go after the election cheats” and put them “in jail for a long time.” ”, before adding: “We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBACKS, be careful!”

Separately, days later, Meta announced it would lift the remaining restrictions on Trump’s Meta account following his suspension from the platform, adding that they were “a response to these circumstances.” extreme and unusual cases”.

Zuckerberg also publicly described Trump as a “bad guy” for his response to an assassination attempt and called on him to apologize after the platform mistakenly removed photos of the attack.

Trump said in a television interview that Zuckerberg told him during the call that he would not endorse a Democrat out of respect for him. Meta said the founder had intended to limit his support to one candidate.

Zuckerberg is is no longer with Sheryl Sandbergformer Meta executive and longtime Democrat who served as the company’s political face for many years. Brian Rice, a former legislative aide to Democratic senator John Kerry, is among those handling relations with the left, while Joel Kaplan, a prominent conservative known for overseeing overseeing their ties to the Republican party, remains Meta’s vice president of global policy.

Some people believe that Zuckerberg was encouraged by X Musk.

David Evan Harris said: “With Elon Musk coming in and literally saying ‘fuck you’ to people who think he shouldn’t run Twitter the way he does, he’s lowering the bar significantly about acceptable behavior for a social media platform.” Chancellor’s public scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and former Meta employee. “He gives Mark Zuckerberg a lot of power and authority Plenty of time to challenge.”