He’s No Elon Musk

Yesterday morning, donning his new signature fit—gold chain, oversize T-shirt, surfer hair—Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social-media platforms are getting a makeover. His aggrievement was palpable: For years, Zuckerberg said, “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” No longer. Meta is abolishing its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the U.S.; loosening its content filters; and bringing political content back to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Meta’s chief executive declared.

In the announcement, Zuckerberg identified “the recent elections,” in which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans claimed both houses of Congress, as a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” He said Meta will take direct inspiration from X’s “Community Notes” feature, which allows users to annotate posts—and surfaces the annotations based on how other users rate them—rather than granting professional fact-checkers authority to remove or label posts. Among the notable changes is permitting users to describe gay and transgender people as having “mental illness.”

The dog-whistling around legacy media, censorship, and free-speech sounded uncannily like one of Zuckerberg’s greatest rivals: Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a defender of the most noxious speech—at least when he agrees with it. Over the past several years, Musk has become a far-right icon, railing against major publications and liberal politicians for what he deems a “censorship government-industrial complex.” After buying Twitter, he renamed it X and has turned the platform into a bastion for hate speech, personally spread misinformation, and become a Trump confidant and trusted adviser. Zuckerberg has been feuding with Musk for years over their respective social-media dominance and masculinity—the pair even publicly challenged each other to a cage match in 2023.

[Read: X is a white-supremacist site]

This week’s policy changes might be understood as another throwdown between the two men. Although Facebook and Instagram are both considerably more popular than X—not to mention extremely profitable—they lack the political relevance that Musk has cultivated on his platform. That asset has helped bring Trump back for occasional posting there (he is still much more active on his own platform, Truth Social) and, more important, has put X and its owner in favorable positions ahead of Trump’s ascension to the presidency. Musk will even co-lead a new federal commission advising his administration. Their close relationship will likely benefit Musk’s AI, space, and satellite companies, too. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has not been viewed favorably by Trump or his allies: The president-elect has stated that Zuckerberg steered Facebook against him during the 2020 election, and threatened to put the Meta CEO in jail for “the rest of his life,” while Republicans such as Ohio Representative Jim Jordan have complained about alleged censorship on the platform. Currying favor with the right wing, as Musk has done so successfully, may well be mission critical for Meta, which is currently facing an antitrust suit from the Federal Trade Commission that it would surely rather settle.

These shifts are occurring against a longer transformation for the company and its chief executive. Zuckerberg has gone from a deferential, awkward, almost robotic nerd to a flashy mixed-martial-arts enthusiast who posts photos of his fights and has public beef with other tech executives. Meta, after years of waning influence, has been attempting a cultural and technological revival as well—pivoting hard toward generative AI by widely promoting its flagship Llama models and launching its own X competitor, Threads. These personal and corporate changes are one and the same: Zuckerberg has recently shared a photo of himself reading his infant a picture book titled Llama; posted AI-enhanced videos of himself sporting his new martial-arts physique, leg-pressing gold chains, or dressed as a Roman centurion; and showcased an AI-generated illustration of himself in a boy band. Also this week, the company announced that Dana White, the CEO and president of UFC (and a notable Trump backer), joined Meta’s board of directors. The blog post outlining Meta’s new “more speech” policies was written by Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist at Meta who just replaced the company’s long-standing head of global policy, who was considered center-left. Jordan, the once adversarial congressperson, said he is pleased with Meta’s new approach to content moderation and will meet with Zuckerberg in the coming weeks.

[Read: New Mark Zuckerberg dropped]

But for all the effort and bravado, Zuckerberg and Meta have been consistently outdone by Musk. The latter has already overhauled X into a “free speech” haven for the right. If Meta is responding to the recent election by seeking favor with the incoming Trump administration, Musk helped bring Republicans victory and will advise that administration. Musk helped get OpenAI off the ground, and his newer and smaller AI company, xAI, rapidly developed a model, Grok, that has matched and by some metrics surpassed Meta’s own. Zuckerberg might boast about Meta’s AI infrastructure, but xAI partnered with Nvidia to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer in a shockingly fast 122 days. Musk has touted Grok as fulfilling the need for an anti-“woke” AI—the software has been shown to readily sexualize female celebrities and illustrate racist caricatures. It’s easy to imagine Meta lowering its AI guardrails next in a bid to better emulate Musk’s own offensive showboating.

Even if he catches up, Zuckerberg still lacks the confidence of his rival. He presents as both rehearsed and ostentatious; he announced the end of independent fact-checking while wearing a $900,000 watch. Musk is many things, but he is not a poser: His speech is rambling, off-the-cuff, and perceived as visionary by his followers and much of Silicon Valley. He shows up to Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and talks business while streaming video games. “This is cool,” Musk wrote of Meta’s “free speech” pivot, on X, as if commending a younger sibling.

Becoming a martial-arts enthusiast, pivoting to AI, bringing Republicans into Meta’s leadership, decrying “legacy media” and “censorship,” and permitting homophobia are Zuckerberg’s attempts at defiance and renewal. But in no respect is he leading the conversation—rather than upending the technological landscape with the “metaverse,” he is following his competitors in both AI and social media. He may not be capitulating to the Democratic establishment, as he believes his company did in the past, but he is still capitulating to the establishment. It’s just that this time, he is apologizing to the ascendant far-right. “They’ve come a long way,” the president-elect said of Meta’s changes at a press conference yesterday. (Did he think the changes were in response to threats he had made toward Zuckerberg in the past? “Probably,” Trump responded.)

It is worth recalling that Facebook did not strengthen its approach to content moderation and limit political content, changes that Zuckerberg now says amount to “censorship,” just because a few Democratic senators asked. Russian-interference campaigns, various domestic far-right militias, and all manner of misinformation were rampant on the platform for years, wreaking havoc on multiple presidential-election cycles. Facebook exposed users’ private data, was used to plan the Capitol insurrection in the U.S., and fueled ethnic genocide abroad. The platform, prior to those policy changes, was viewed by some as a legitimate threat to democracy; “we have made a lot of mistakes,” Zuckerberg told Congress in 2018. He has had a change of heart—yesterday, Zuckerberg again promised to make “fewer mistakes,” this time referencing the supposed policing of conservative speech. For one of Silicon Valley’s self-appointed kings, perhaps abetting the unraveling of democracy and civil society is, in the end, nothing to apologize for.