Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Mark Zuckerberg was once forced to confirm he was “not a lizard” during a live online Q&A session. It marked neither the first nor the last time people had suggested that the pallid Facebook founder with a slightly robotic manner was some kind of alien. You’ve got to love the internet.These days, though, the Meta chief is sporting a whole new aesthetic: less lizard-man, more standard-issue billionaire tech bro. Gone are the modest grey T-shirts, fitted tightly over a slender frame; in their place, oversized Ts worn over a bulked-up body, topped off with a gold chain and $900,000 watch. The Julius Caesar haircut has also been replaced by a relaxed, Californian-casual curly mop, and Zuckerberg’s skin has gone from deathly pale to verging on “tan” (Americans insist that’s an adjective).I might even suggest that if you were standing in the same room as Zuck, you would notice he was wearing a new scent — a rather musk-y one, perhaps. Along with his new look come some new opinions, and they seem to have been strongly influenced by a certain fellow west coast billionaire.“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said in a video statement posted to Meta’s website on Tuesday. In it, he explained that the company would be scrapping the teams of professional fact-checkers it currently employs and replacing them with a crowdsourced “community notes” system as Elon Musk’s X has. This will only be in the US to start with, though he would also “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world”. “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuck said (note the use of the term “legacy media”, one of Musk’s favourites). “But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I’m excited to take it.”I should start by saying that I have some major issues with the whole concept of fact-checking in the context of social media, which I have expressed publicly a number of times. When a Bloomberg columnist asked for examples of fact-checkers showing political bias, Meta sent back three pieces, including a column I wrote in 2021, in which I argued that fact-checking is often used as censorship. I have also written positively about community notes, though that system has limitations as well.And while the online spread of mis- and disinformation concerns me greatly, it is pretty much impossible for fact-checking to be done truly objectively given that all humans have biases. Choices have to be made about which claims to check and which to wave through. So the idea that you can thoroughly “fact-check” an entire social network has always been a fantasy. And there are few financial incentives for platforms to do so (unless they are worried about being fined by regulators).The problem I have with all this is not so much the substance of what is going on at Meta. I even think that moving the content moderation teams from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas — a Democratic city in a largely very Republican state — so as to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”, as Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, is a fairly sensible idea. But the very phrasing of that gives away his true motives: this is not about principles, but optics and pleasing the soon-to-be-resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.My issue with Zuckerberg is his spinelessness and opportunism. Ask yourself this: is there any chance that Zuckerberg would be making all these changes at Meta — he has also appointed Trump ally Dana White to the board, and replaced Nick Clegg with prominent Republican Joel Kaplan as president of global affairs — if Kamala Harris had won in November? Even Trump himself doesn’t think so. Last year he warned that Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if the Meta boss attempted to “plot against” him. Asked on Tuesday whether Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats [Trump had] made to him in the past” with this fact-checking U-turn, the president-elect replied: “Probably.” Zuckerberg might talk a good talk about how he is no longer going to be caving in to government demands, but he still is caving in — just to different ones. In many ways, all this means is that Zuckerberg is less dangerous than Musk. It is clear in which direction the influence was being exerted when the Meta boss went to have dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He goes where the wind blows. I would feel more comfortable if the man in charge of platforms that are used by two-fifths of the world’s population could show some moral courage and leadership. He might have successfully transformed his image, but at least lizards have backbones. jemima.kelly@ft.com
