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It’s the latest dance craze: Tech executives from Silicon Valley to Seattle are tying themselves in knots to win favor with the incoming Trump administration. Mark Zuckerberg flew to Mar-a-Lago to dine with President-elect Donald Trump. So did Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Jeff Bezos blocked the newspaper he owns from running an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, and Sam Altman (like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Pichai’s Google) donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Those tech magnates or their firms — and other corporate players including Boeing, Toyota and Ford — have all made million-dollar donations to the inaugural committee. And they’re also beginning to elbow out First Buddy Elon Musk, who Altman called “co-president.”
Four years ago, the same tech titans wanted nothing to do with Trump. Zuckerberg knocked him off Facebook, Bezos’ Washington Post hit him hard, and Bezos himself said Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election “erodes our democracy.”
Last time around, Trump said Amazon’s e-commerce juggernaut was destroying America’s towns and Main Streets, and wanted Bezos to pay more to use the U.S. Postal Service to deliver its packages. And as recently as last summer, Trump said Zuckerberg plotted against him in the 2020 election and warned that the Facebook founder would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again.
But this time, they seem to have turned their coats inside out, pledging fealty to Trump for what looks like a simple trade: immunity from closer inspection by the incoming administration.
“A lot of tech companies don’t want to be caught in [Trump’s] crosshairs for whatever reason because he is extremely unpredictable,” said Ryan Broderick, whose newsletter Garbage Day looks at the intersection of tech and politics. “None of them want to be regulated, and none of them want to be scrutinized by Trump. They’re all trying to avoid scrutiny and continue at the same size that they’ve been at, and if that means that they have to give some money to Trump and they have to become more lax, they’re happy to do that.”
The biggest turnaround is by Zuckerberg, who earlier this week posted a five-minute video explaining that at his direction, Meta has given up on fact-checking because, he said, “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” Calling Trump’s election “a cultural tipping point,” he said Facebook will get back to “restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Never mind whether the poster is yelling the political equivalent of fire in a crowded theater, “the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased.” said Zuckerberg. The remaining fact-checkers will focus on “drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation” and will move from liberal California to conservative Texas, he said.
“I think he’s a businessman that realizes that he’s in a very legally dubious situation because he owns a massive monopoly and doesn’t have a lot of friends,” Broderick said. “And I think he’s doing what he can to maybe get Trump off his back in the beginning of the administration.”
The flip-flops haven’t gone unnoticed. As Trump said late last year at Mar-a-Lago, “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”
OpenAI boss Altman told Bloomberg News that the $1 million donation isn’t selling out. “Supporting the inauguration, I think that’s a relatively small thing,” Altman. “I don’t view that as a big decision either way. But I do think we all should wish for the president’s success.”
The problem with the tech titans — especially platform owners like Zuckerberg and Musk — pledging their loyalty to Trump in such an overt manner, industry watchers say, is its effect on the mechanisms of democracy. Social media platforms have largely replaced traditional media as avenues of factual information and become the public square for debate and decision-making.
A survey last September by the Pew Research Center found that 21% of U.S. adults say they regularly get news from news influencers on social media, and 37% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly get news from influencers. Most of those influencers are on X, which dropped its fact-checking two years ago, and on Facebook.
“There’s a lot to be concerned about with the... tech companies and their cozying up to Trump,” said Kristen Monroe, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, and director of the school’s Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. “That’s frightening for many reasons,” she added, noting that most of the tech firms appear to have aligned with Trump to avoid regulatory scrutiny of their dominant market positions.
That alignment often means letting unfounded claims and fake news circulate on their platforms. “If you can’t get accurate information, it puts a much higher burden on the citizen to figure out what is accurate and what isn’t,” Monroe said. “We’re at a point where there are many more challenges to free, accurate, truthful speech than we’ve had in the past.”
“They’re giving up,” Broderick said. “It’s very much a political decision. But it’s also based on a desire to not have to try to do something they were never quite good at in the first place, which is moderating these massive systems.”
One imminent danger, Broderick said, is the eruption of unmoderated aggression and fake news where Facebook has become the town square, especially in smaller communities that no longer have a local newspaper or local TV news coverage, and which have grown to rely on Facebook groups for basic civic information.
There’s a clear danger in all this, said Jeff Jarvis, a visiting professor of media studies at Stony Brook University and the author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis.
“The problem we’re all stuck in now is that if we were to, on principle, take our business elsewhere, there’s nowhere else to take it,” Jarvis said. “And it’s not just technology, it’s corporate America.”
But even as the platforms take a political turn, Jarvis said technology may just offer a way forward.
“I don’t think we should obligate ourselves to retreating into capitalist caves, because I don’t think it’s going to accomplish anything,” he said. “Instead, what I think we have to do is to say, ‘I’m your customer and I’m enraged, I’m pissed at you for doing this, I’m disappointed in you for doing this.’ And to create a countervailing pressure from the public on these companies.”
— Peter Green, Contributing Editor