Four years ago, several of California’s most influential tech titans determined that then-President Trump was such a threat to democracy they barred him from posting on their social media platforms.
“We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his platform on Jan. 7, 2021 — one day after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to keep him in power.
Today, some of the same tech leaders, including Zuckerberg, are taking a strikingly different tone as Trump prepares to retake the White House. They are meeting with him personally, touting the business opportunities they see under his next administration, announcing policies that appear designed to appease him and bankrolling the pageantry of his return with huge donations to his inaugural fund.
On Tuesday, four years to the day since his post announcing Trump’s Facebook suspension, Zuckerberg posted a video arguing that the “complex systems” his company has built to moderate dangerous, illicit and misleading content have led to “too much censorship” — a favorite argument of Trump’s — and will be dramatically scaled back.
Calling the recent elections “a cultural tipping point,” Zuckerberg said Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — will “get rid of fact checkers” and instead rely on users to challenge misleading posts. The company will greatly reduce its content restrictions on some of Trump’s favorite political subjects, such as immigration and gender, he added, and ratchet up the amount of political content its algorithms steer to users.
It also will move remaining safety and content moderation teams out of California and into Texas, which Zuckerberg suggested would provide a less “biased” environment, and work directly with Trump “to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
Industry experts say the changes are part of a broader shift in public political posturing by big tech’s heavy hitters — one that began long before Trump’s November win but has escalated greatly since, and is greater than the perfunctory bowing of pragmatic business leaders with the changeover in government every four years.
Some have defended the shift. In an interview with the Associated Press last month, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff credited it to the incoming Trump administration showing more interest than the Biden administration in industry concerns and expertise.
“I think a lot of people realize there is a lot of incredible people like Elon Musk in the tech industry and in the business community,” Benioff said. “If you tap the power and expertise of the best in America to make the best of America, that’s a great vision.”
Others say the shift reflects a financial calculation, in line with the libertarian streak that has long run deep in tech circles, that Trump’s penchant for deregulation and disdain for content moderation — which he has claimed is biased against conservatives — will be good for the bottom line, the experts said.
The tech executives see an opportunity to wipe their hands of the expensive responsibility to clean up their platforms, the experts said, and a useful excuse to do so under the guise of free speech — an ideal Trump has often cited in order to ridicule platform moderation.
“It is a recognizing that Trump’s power is enormous, as we’ve seen through the election, that he’s definitely here to stay for these four years, [and] that the MAGA movement is the biggest social movement in the United States,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, director of the UC Center for Global Digital Cultures. “When it comes to Meta and these big companies, their interest is in maintaining if not increasing their valuation and/or profitability, and they’re gonna go with whatever the easiest ways are to achieve just that.”
That posture is unsurprising and financially savvy, he and other experts said, but also alarming — particularly in light of Trump’s promises to wield the Justice Department as a political weapon against his enemies and the tech leaders’ willingness to counteract that threat with cash and other consolations to the White House, they said.
Sarah T. Roberts, co-founder and faculty director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, said the tech donations to Trump’s inaugural fund were “quite a vulgar demonstration” that in order “to succeed in the marketplace in the next four years, it will require currying favor with the president.”
A major problem is that decisions by Meta, X and others to capitulate to Trump by tossing away years of accumulated know-how and expertise in the area of content moderation are not in the best interests of platform users around the world who are harmed when such safeguards aren’t in place, said Roberts, author of “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media.”
The tech leaders know that, too, but don’t seem to care, she said.
“They know from their own internal research that there is harm without measures and efforts to intervene, and they are making very calculated decisions to ignore their own evidence, dismantle those teams, [and] sell out their own work and workers,” Roberts said.
Also at work, said Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University, is a long-running strategy among big tech leaders to reshape American capitalism in their favor by gaining influence in Washington.
“They are getting involved in politics in ways that go beyond the money,” he said. “They’re interested in power.”
Money and power
Zuckerberg, Elon Musk of X, Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google and other leaders in the cryptocurrency and AI industries who have backed Trump control platforms and services that play an outsize role in shaping civil discourse and political debate, experts said.
An important check on their sweeping powers is government regulation, which has increased in recent years as countries grapple with the threats such platforms pose to consumers and democracy, including through the spread of misinformation and hate speech.
Individual nations and the European Union have increasingly issued mandates for content moderation and the safeguarding of children, issued take-down orders for content deemed illegal or dangerous, and filed antitrust and other litigation to break up or fine the companies for anticompetitive business practices.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and X — formerly Twitter — have all faced antitrust litigation or review in recent years, some of which originated under the first Trump administration. None responded to requests for comment, though they have denied wrongdoing in court.
They or their chief executives also have all pledged donations to Trump’s inaugural fund, which pays for galas, parades and dinners.
Meta and Apple’s Cook have said they will contribute $1 million to Trump’s fund. Google has said it’s giving $1 million and that the inauguration will be streamed on YouTube. Amazon, led by multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, has committed to giving $1 million in cash plus a $1-million in-kind contribution by streaming the inauguration on Amazon Video.
Musk, the world’s richest man, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars — the most of any single donor in the 2024 election cycle — to help reelect Trump and Republicans in the House and Senate, including through two separate political action committees, campaign finance filings show.
Musk has been in Trump’s inner circle ever since, and Trump has appointed him to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Bill Baer, former head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in the Obama administration, said the tech leaders are “currying favor” — which he added was “not a crazy thing for them to be doing” given Trump’s focus on loyalty.
“They want to make sure that, if there is an enemies list being compiled, they’re not on it,” Baer said.
It’s also unclear how the Trump administration is going to handle tech platforms or the investigations into their operations, Baer said. Both Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance have “expressed some concern about tech platforms,” and there “seems to be a mixed view among Republicans in Congress,” he said.
Baer’s concern, however, is that the Trump White House will make good on its promises to “control law enforcement in a way that would allow it to protect its friends and to pursue its enemies, and that includes people who are currently being sued on antitrust grounds as monopolists, as well as people being investigated for those behaviors.”
If Trump does so, the tech leaders’ willingness to pay into his inaugural fund and appease him in other ways will raise legal questions, Baer said — especially if the antitrust cases against them suddenly go away, or they get off easy.
It’s “something that the public ought to be concerned about” Baer said. “Our whole economy is built on the notion that competition results in innovation, in price competition, in quality improvement.”
‘Everyone wants to be my friend’
At a December news conference, Trump remarked on the “much less hostile” reception he has received from tech leaders.
“The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump said.
When asked about Meta’s announcement Tuesday — which followed another naming Dana White, chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a staunch Trump loyalist, to Meta’s board — Trump simply said Zuckerberg has “come a long way.”
The remark was a nod to the argument by Trump and other Republicans that big tech is steeped in liberal bias and that its algorithms and content moderation are designed to help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
Experts say there is plenty of evidence to show that bias is a myth — not least of all the latest actions of tech’s most powerful leaders.
But regardless of those leaders’ personal politics, they have all “drawn the same conclusion” that they must stroke Trump’s ego, Roberts said.
“If that’s the price of doing business, I guess they are prepared to do it — while selling out a lot of other people and putting them in danger.”
Lalka, of Tulane and author of “The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power,” said the fact that Trump is surrounded by tech leaders reflects how vastly Silicon Valley has shifted its posture on politics since 2016 — when venture capitalist Peter Thiel raised industry eyebrows by donating $1.25 million to Trump’s first campaign.
Lalka said Americans underestimate, and should be better informed on, the degree to which Silicon Valley types have since infiltrated government — Vance, among others, also has deep ties to Thiel — and how much they stand to permanently alter American governance to better serve their own free market interests.
Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and the aligned plans under Project 2025 to fire career civil servants in favor of Trump loyalists are perfect examples, he said.
“What they’re arguing for here is much more Silicon Valley of an idea — which is that anything that is legacy, that is traditional, needs to be rejected in favor of the new, the novel, the innovative, the technological,” Lalka said. “Do we have that appetite for risk taking based on these people who are coming in? As a general public, I’m not sure about that.”
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