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Zuck’s Great Suck Up

Mark Zuckerberg seems to have decided that kissing Donald Trump's ring was not enough. Now he's slobbering all over it.

Author

Oliver Darcy
January 07, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta will eliminate third-party fact-checks. (Status illustration/Screen grab)

Four years ago, to the day, Mark Zuckerberg made an unprecedented announcement on Facebook. In a firmly written post, the Meta chief said that his platforms were placing an indefinite block on Donald Trump's accounts because the then-president had wielded them "to incite [a] violent insurrection against a democratically elected government."

Of course, at the time, Trump had just lost the 2020 election and was well on his way to being exiled from political power (albeit, temporarily, as it turned out). Zuckerberg, along with the entire business community, had the upper hand and knew it. Which is to say that banning Trump back then from using Meta's platforms wasn't brave, by any means. In fact, Zuckerberg would have faced far more scrutiny if he stood by idly and refused to do the right thing and take action.

Fast forward a few trips around the sun, though, and Zuckerberg did have a real opportunity to put on an actual show of bravery. Trump openly threatened to throw him in jail and to abuse the powers of the federal government to target his American-made company. Zuckerberg could have used his immense wealth and power to stand up to the wannabe autocrat. He could have stood tall and denounced Trump's plainly un-American threats. But instead, Zuckerberg cowered. And he has done so in such an embarrassing fashion that he has revealed…

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