Was Mark Zuckerberg’s cringey spinelessness just an attempt to grovel before Donald Trump to avoid a vindictive criminal lawsuit? Given the timing of the letter coming out just before Trump’s new book that threatens to imprison Zuckerberg in a bout of authoritarian vindictiveness, it sounds like the reason Zuck is feeding the MAGA conspiracy theories is to try to appease Trump.
Earlier this week, I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s preposterously spineless letter to Jim Jordan, in which he repeats a bunch of things that were already public knowledge about the White House suggesting that Facebook could help save lives by not promoting dangerous anti-vax information. However, he did so in a manner that would allow people like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump to pretend that he moderated content because the Biden White House ordered him to, and that this was a big scandal that Meta would not let happen again.
In that post, I noted a key part of Zuckerberg’s letter: the claim that now he would stand up to government coercion. But that’s laughable, given that the letter itself is him caving in to threats of coercion by Jim Jordan.
Multiple people saw the news of the letter and claimed that it was an admission by Zuckerberg that he wanted Donald Trump to win. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seemed pretty clear that the entire intent of the letter was to position himself as a suck-up to Trump in case Trump wins.
Now there’s a bit more evidence for that. Politico reported that Donald Trump has a new book coming out next week in which he not only blames Mark Zuckerberg for apparently trying to rig the election against him, but also talks about wanting to put Zuckerberg in jail for the rest of his life if he dares do anything to influence this election.
This is ridiculous (and dangerous) on multiple levels. The claim that he helped rig the election is nonsense, based on Zuck’s charity spending a bunch of money on better election infrastructure. As Zuckerberg said in his spineless letter, that was on a non-partisan basis.
The only way spending on secure election infrastructure is biased towards one party is if the other party was planning to abuse insecure voting infrastructure to steal an election. So one way to read this is a Trump admission that Zuckerberg’s effort to make the election more secure foiled his plans to steal it.
Either way, part of Zuckerberg’s attempt to get back in the good graces of Trump was to claim he wouldn’t do that again merely because some people thought it looked biased in one direction.
One of those “some people” appears to be Trump:
Trump writes that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT,” Trump added, referring to a $420 million contribution Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made during the 2020 election to fund election infrastructure.
So, first off, funding election infrastructure is not plotting against the President. I mean, that’s simply unhinged. But then he claims that if it happened again, he’d put Zuckerberg in jail:
“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” Trump continues. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The problem with basically all of this is that it’s made-up nonsense, pushed by the MAGA faithful to try to make sure that no one ever calls them on their bullshit.
Facebook did not “steer against” Trump. Multiple studies showed the exact opposite. Reports showed that Facebook actually had a different, more lenient, set of rules for top Republicans because they so frequently violated the policies on the site. Other studies showed that Trumpist content spread better on Facebook, and that the top interactions on Facebook were almost entirely from Trump and friends. Indeed, it was leaked that there were different rules put in place to limit the reach of left-leaning sites.
And the “thanks” that Zuckerberg gets for all that is to be accused of interfering against Trump in the election and being threatened with a vindictive criminal trial.
Zuckerberg was likely aware of this book when he sent the letter earlier this week, which makes that letter so much more pathetic. It’s not even that Zuckerberg can’t stand up to the lies and bullshit framing of Jim Jordan — which is only there to pressure Zuckerberg to again favor Trump & Friends over Democrats — but that Zuckerberg feels the need to do this fake show of groveling to appease Trump, because Trump is so stupid he believes the made up theory that Zuckerberg was against him all this time.
Of course, lots of billionaires support one candidate or another. Elon, obviously, has gone all in for Trump, leading ExTwitter to becoming a non-stop campaign ad for Trump while pushing nonsense conspiracy theories (often pushed by Elon himself) against Harris and Walz.
The hypocrisy is staggering. If Zuckerberg deserves life in prison for supposedly favoring Biden (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), then by that logic, doesn’t Musk deserve the same for openly turning ExTwitter into a 24/7 Trump propaganda machine? Of course not. In Trump’s world, it’s only a crime when the other side does it. But last I checked, billionaires on both sides of the aisle have the right to free speech and political preferences – even if Zuck is too spineless to stand up for his.
But, really, the timing of Zuck’s letter suggests it was done on purpose to try to get back in Trump’s good graces at the same time this book was coming out. It just reinforces that Zuckerberg is willing to cave to political pressure. And that pressure is from Trump.
At the same time, Trump’s claims in the book suggest this latest pathetic political ploy won’t even work. Imagine being as rich and as powerful as Zuckerberg, and feeling the need to feed a nonsense conspiracy theory, which you know is a nonsense conspiracy theory, just in the hopes that maybe Trump and his crew will stop falsely claiming you rigged the election (another nonsense conspiracy theory).
It’s a masterclass in spinelessness: groveling to appease a conspiracy theory that you yourself know is baseless, all in the vain hope of avoiding the wrath of a vindictive ex-president.