A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To receive it in your inbox, sign up for free Here.

new York
CNN
—

Four years ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg banned Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram, saying the risks of allowing him on the platforms were “simply too great” after Trump repeatedly used the sites to spread election lies and the to cheer on the January 6 mob.

A lot has changed.

Now Zuckerberg is making it clear that meta and MAGA can get along.

The social media giant is banishing its fact-checkers and making its platforms look a little more like X, the site of “first buddy” Elon Musk. At the same time, Meta appointed Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White to the board on Monday, just days after naming Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican lobbyist, as its new head of global affairs. Meta was one of several major tech companies to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And Zuckerberg – who Trump once threatened with life in prison – has personally made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago since the election to dine with the new president.

While Zuckerberg is clearly trying to insulate Meta from Trump’s looming corporate retaliation spree, he’s also courting potential catastrophe as advertisers flee Meta and users begin to criticize the brand – already tarnished by AI vulnerabilities and a years-long lack of innovation. to associate with the kind of unsavory characters that now dominate X.

On Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg used the president-elect’s favorite television network, Fox News, to announce that the world’s dominant social media platforms are now pro-Trump in every way.

Meta is getting rid of its third-party fact-checkers, Zuckerberg said, because they were “too politically biased,” made too many mistakes “and destroyed more trust than they created” — irrefutable statements that reflect the long-standing tradition of the right claiming that Facebook promotes conservative views censored. Meta will replace fact checkers with “community notes,” similar to those on X, where users can add comments to posts that may contain false information.

In another questionable decision announced Tuesday, Zuckerberg added that Meta would move its content moderation team from California to Texas, saying it would “eliminate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.” (Meta did not respond to CNN’s question about why a team in Texas should be less biased than one in California.)

The hits kept coming on Tuesday when my colleague Clare Duffy reported that Meta had quietly updated its policies for free users who want to label gay and transgender people as “mentally ill” or women as “household objects” and “property.” ”

All of this gives Meta a certain level of security for the era of Trump 2.0. As business leaders from the first round remember all too well, Trump showed little restraint when he felt that companies were not sufficiently loyal. Meta’s own shares plunged in March after Trump called on CNBC to call Facebook an “enemy of the people.”

If Meta took the harder line it took four years ago, it could expect to find itself in Trump’s crosshairs on social media and locked out of the spaces where rivals like Musk decide the future of technology.

But repositioning Meta is hardly a foolproof business plan. Just look at X, the website Musk acquired in 2022 when it was still called Twitter. Musk redesigned the site in his own image, reinstating white nationalist and other objectionable accounts that had been suspended under Twitter’s security policies. Advertisers, fearful that their products would appear alongside hate speech, rushed for the exits. Millions of users, also dissatisfied with the return of neo-Nazis to the platform, also switched to competitors such as Bluesky and Meta’s Threads.

Investment giant Fidelity estimates that X’s value has plummeted 80% since Musk bought it.

This isn’t a big problem for X and Musk, as they could theoretically finance the entire operation themselves.

The same cannot be said for Meta, one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world with a market cap of $1.5 trillion.

“Brand safety remains a key factor in determining where advertisers spend their budgets,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Emarketer, said in an email Tuesday. “Social media is already a minefield for content that many brands consider unsafe, and Meta’s change could exacerbate these issues.”

Even a small decline in engagement could hurt the business, Enberg said.

We’ve seen it before.

In 2022, Meta lost nearly $240 billion in market value in a single day – the company’s largest single-day loss Value in the history of the US stock market at that time — after it reported a slight decline in daily active Facebook users and an 8% drop in quarterly profit.

This hits Zuckerberg where he lives, because he is the largest individual shareholder, says Cory Doctorow, journalist, author and activist with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. But more importantly, the stock swings are hitting the wealthy but non-billionaire meta-executive class.

“Zuckerberg is insulated from the consequences of bad decisions until he isn’t — until things reach a breaking point … and then he tends to panic,” Doctorow told me. “The tech industry calls these panics ‘pivots,’ but they’re simply the result of being the CEO of a company that’s experiencing weak growth or even decline and seeing the road come crashing down on you.”

Previous “pivots” have included the Metaverse, the sci-fi nonsense that Zuckerberg described as the future of the company three years ago. More recently, Meta is testing its own AI-generated “users” in an apparent ploy to increase engagement.

“You are now at the end of a long line of extremely bad decisions,” Doctorow said. But that doesn’t mean that meta per se is doomed. “But I think they are on the way to becoming a kind of zombie, like MySpace today. MySpace still exists. It’s just AI-generated crap and spam.”