Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows a prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses at the Meta Connect developers conference in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024. (Photo: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“We can’t afford more corrupt politicians bought by Big Tech,” said one Democratic US House candidate.
Meta, the parent company of social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is spending big bucks to ensure that government regulations don’t interfere with its ambitions in artificial intelligence.
The New York Timesreported on Wednesday that Meta is planning to spend $65 million on this year’s midterm elections, with one super political action committee (PAC) dedicated to electing AI-friendly Democrats, and another dedicated to electing AI-friendly Republicans.
The pro-Democratic super PAC, called Making Our Tomorrow, will work to influence congressional races in Illinois, while the pro-GOP PAC, called Forge the Future Project, will be focusing on congressional races in Texas.
The Times noted that Meta has in the past been “cautious about campaign engagements, making small donations out of a corporate political action committee and contributing to presidential inaugurations,” but it has decided to ramp up its spending to defend its AI business from governmental interference.
Meta’s spending splurge to elect pro-AI candidates is just one of many efforts by the AI industry to ensure a friendly regulatory environment.
CNNreported last week that Leading the Future—a super PAC backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and other AI heavyweights—is pledging to spend at least $100 million to influence the 2026 midterm election.
The goal of the PAC will be to elect lawmakers who will pass legislation to set a single set of AI regulations that will take effect throughout the US, overriding any restrictions placed on the technology by state governments.
The PACs’ big spending comes as a nationwide backlash to Big Tech has been forming across the US, as many communities are fighting against the construction of energy-devouring AI data centers that are raising electricity prices and have been accused of degrading the quality of local water supplies.
Reed Showalter, a Democratic US House of Representatives candidate running in Illinois’ 7th Congressional District, said the report of Meta’s big spending showed the importance of ensuring that voters elect leaders who will hold the major tech companies accountable.
“We deserve representatives who are going to take an honest look at AI and regulate it accordingly,” he wrote in a social media post. “We can’t afford more corrupt politicians bought by Big Tech.”
Democratic New York congressional candidate Alex Bores, who is running on a platform of regulating AI, said during an interview with CNN on Wednesday that the tech companies’ actions show they are “terrified” of being held accountable by elected officials.
He also noted that being attacked by the Leading the Future super PAC has ironically helped his candidacy.
“The fact that they’re being so aggressive with it, I think, has been redounding to my benefit,” he told host Dana Bash. “I’ve had a lot of constituents who have reached out and said, ‘I hadn’t even heard of you until all these text messages [from the AI super PAC].”
"These Trump megadonors who are attacking me are terrified of having someone in Congress that's already beaten them": NY-12 Dem candidate @AlexBores to @DanaBashCNN on why pro-AI groups are spending to defeat him in the crowded primary to replace Nadler. pic.twitter.com/IB3Y48Izbj
Watchdog social media account @OilPACTracker predicted that Meta’s major political spending could turn into a liability if voters are made aware of its machinations.
“We would make sure the electorate knows about it,” the watchdog wrote. “Big Tech money is toxic.
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There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the right claimed that the big social media companies weren’t just skewed to the left in terms of moderation, but that they were actually acting in the direct interests of the Democratic administration (House Judiciary Committee, 5/1/24).
When right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X, the right believed that he’d show the world that the popular site was a tool of the Democratic agenda (New Yorker, 1/11/23). The move increased Musk’s profile as a conservative crusader against social progress and economic populism before his brief stint as President Donald Trump’s federal jobs hatchet man in 2025 (Roosevelt Institute, 5/29/25).
Before a forced sale by its Beijing-based parent company, TikTok was attacked by both Democrats and Republicans because of its ownership, with both sides claiming that this not only gave the Chinese government the ability to spy on Americans, but also to skew political discourse away from Washington’s interests (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 5/8/24, 1/3/25).
At Meta, founder Mark Zuckerberg quickly tried to distance his company from the notion that it acted in tandem with the Biden administration. Politico (8/26/24) reported:
Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was “wrong,” and he plans to push back if it happens again.
Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan (Joe Rogan Experience, 1/10/25) that the Biden administration had been “calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don’t take down things that are true.” He asserted that Meta, and especially Facebook, “had gone too far in complying with such requests, and acknowledged that he and others at the company wrongly bought into the idea” (Axios, 1/10/25).
Meta ‘in bed with the regime’
ICE List founder Dominick Skinner (Daily Beast, 1/27/26): “I don’t believe that it’s somehow an accident that a company so deeply ingrained in this regime is suddenly blocking a website that actively fights against it.”
If you took these claims at face value, you would expect that we would have a more neutral and less government-controlled social media in 2026. Instead, we have a social media oligarchy that is now working directly in the interests of the Trump administration’s national police state.
X converted from a free-wheeling social media site into a 24-hour online MAGA rally (Guardian, 1/4/25; NBC News, 2/16/25) a long time ago. But there are new developments involving other platforms. All of Meta’s social media sites—Facebook, Instagram and Threads—are blocking access to ICE List, a website that lists names of Homeland Security agents (Wired, 1/27/26).
Politico (1/27/26) reported that the website’s founder, Dominick Skinner, “questioned Meta’s policy against posting links to websites that contained people’s personal information.” Politico said he added “that Meta’s platforms had no issues with posting people-finder websites such as White Pages that shared individuals’ phone numbers and family members.”
I believe that Mark Zuckerberg is in bed with the regime. He was sitting behind Trump at the inauguration. His algorithms have worked to shape people into right-wing followers.
“Meta donated to the Trump Ballroom,” he pointed out—which is also true of other tech firms such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google (Fortune, 10/26/25).
TikTok now free to censor?
“We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we engage, and the most important ones are social media,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told pro-Israel influencers last September (Al Jazeera, 1/29/26). “The most important purchase that is going on right now is…TikTok.”
The TikTok deal is now final, with its Chinese former parent company, ByteDance, holding about a fifth of the network, with a major bulk controlled by tech giant Oracle, Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX (Reuters, 1/23/26). The sale was celebrated as a win against Chinese infiltration into the US media market, but the Washington Post editorial board (1/23/26) believed this wasn’t good enough:
ByteDance will maintain ownership of TikTok’s coveted algorithm and license it to the spinoff. The announcement emphasizes that the algorithm’s recommendations will be stored in Oracle’s US cloud system but also that the two companies will retain “global product interoperability,” with ByteDance maintaining control over e-commerce and marketing. That sounds like much less of a breakup than Congress intended.
FAIR (3/14/24, 9/27/24, 1/3/25) has long been skeptical of the US government move to force the sale of TikTok, as it was often based on dubious claims about data mining, and awash with McCarthyist fearmongering. Worse, Oracle’s co-founder is Larry Ellison, another right-wing tech billionaire (FAIR.org, 9/19/25; All Things Considered, 10/6/25), making the TikTok sale eerily reminiscent of the Musk takeover of Twitter.
Right after the deal was finalized, “users were raising concerns that the company is ‘censoring’ videos, including ones critical of President Donald Trump, ICE or mentions of Jeffrey Epstein,” AP (1/27/26) reported. “The complaints were enough for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce…that he is launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.”
It reportedly wasn’t just censorship about ICE and Epstein. “Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has said she has been permanently banned from TikTok,” Al Jazeera (1/29/26) said, “days after the social media platform was acquired by new investors in the United States.”
Cripple social media to crush protests
Apple pulled an ICE alert app from its online store as “defamatory, discriminatory or mean-spirited content.” CNN (10/3/25) noted: “Apple and its CEO Tim Cook have in recent months sought to strengthen the company’s relationship with the White House, amid policy changes from Trump that could threaten its business.”
Wealthy capitalists buy social media companies for the same reason they buy newspapers and radio stations: They want to use media to sway the political discussion toward policies that meet their economic and political interests. Musk taking over Twitter isn’t much different from Amazon titan Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post and turning its opinion section into a right-wing propaganda machine (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; New Republic, 11/3/25; Press Watch, 12/12/25; FAIR.org, 1/22/25, 1/28/25) and putting its news operation on life support (The Hill, 1/27/26).
But given growing street resistance to the state terror perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol in cities around the US, these reports about social media blackouts are alarming, reminiscent of reports out of Turkey (Reuters, 9/8/25) and Iran (New York Times, 1/25/26).
With Zuckerberg, Musk and Ellison all showing their allegiance to the administration in various ways, this is all just more evidence that regime-adjacent social media are working in the interests of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. And this has been brewing for some time. A few months ago, CNN (10/3/25) reported, Apple “removed ICEBlock and similar apps that allow people to alert others nearby about sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their area,” after receiving “a request from the US Department of Justice.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (11/20/25) sued the DoJ and Department of Homeland Security over this and similar instances of platforms removing “apps that document immigration enforcement activities in communities throughout the country.”
‘A really troubling thing‘
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (1/27/26) commended the news social media platform UpScrolled “for pledging to protect the free flow of ideas on its platform, including both support for and opposition to the Israeli government’s human rights abuses.”
In an interview with FAIR, EFF senior counsel David Greene said there are several problems at play. One is that
there’s still a great deal of concentration in the direct-publishing social media space, so any decision that gets made by Meta or YouTube or TikTok is going to affect a ton of people who use their services to get their information.
But there is also tremendous pressure by the government to keep immigration enforcement, and all the expanded policing around mass deportations, in the shadows by keeping agents’ identities anonymous. “That’s a really, really troubling thing,” he said.
Greene also stressed that “if Meta or TikTok are doing this just to curry favor with the administration, or because they ideologically agree with it, that’s not illegal; they have a First Amendment right to curate their sites.”
Illegal, no, but still a critical problem. We aren’t looking at a totalitarian form of speech control, where the state and ruling party directly control various forms of media. Rather, we have a clan of oligarchs aligning themselves with authoritarian government goals because they benefit from being close to the regime.
While many activists have shown dismay at these developments, others have said the challenges inspire hope. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (1/27/26) said in a statement that “young people censored on TikTok have no intention of giving up their activism,” as they have “have repeatedly shown that they will not allow politicians, corporations or colleges to censor their speech.”
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Robby Starbuck speaks in an interview in New York in March. Photograph: Bess Adler/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Critics condemn Robby Starbuck, appointed in lawsuit settlement, for ‘peddling lies and pushing extremism’
A prominent anti-DEI campaigner appointed by Meta in August as an adviser on AI bias has spent the weeks since his appointment spreading disinformation about shootings, transgender people, vaccines, crime, and protests.
Robby Starbuck, 36, of Nashville, was appointed in August as an adviser by Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other tech platforms – in an August lawsuit settlement.
Since his appointment, Starbuck has baselessly claimed that individual shooters in the US were motivated by leftist ideology, described faith-based protest groups as communists, and without evidence tied Democratic lawmakers to murders.
Starbuck’s online posts have not changed in tenor since the “anti-DEI agitator” was brought into the Meta fold, and his Trump administration connections raise broader questions about the extent to which corporate America has capitulated to the Maga movement.
The Guardian repeatedlycontacted Meta for comment on Starbuck’s role, and his rhetoric online, but received no response.
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Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson – Pool/Getty Images)
Major media outlets from CBS to The Washington Post have “bent the knee” to President Trump’s specious demands.
U.S. President Donald Trump is following the authoritarian’s handbook that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to consolidate power in Hungary. He is attacking the independent institutions that comprise the infrastructure supporting democracy—universities, law firms, culture, and the media.
And he is winning.
Major media outlets have “bent the knee” his press secretary’s preferred phrase for capitulation to Trump’s specious demands. His latest conquest is CBS.
CBS
Days before the 2024 election, Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit accusing the network of bias in broadcasting a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Seeking $10 billion in damages, the complaint claimed that the edited interview and associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in Harris’ favor.
Prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that “the First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation.” Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet called it “ridiculous junk and should be mocked.” Attorney Charles Tobin warned, “This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”
A few days later, Trump won the election. And now CBS’ parent company, Paramount, wants to settle the case.
Whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion.
Through her family’s holding company, Shari Redstone who is “friendly with Trump” is Paramount’s controlling shareholder. If the Federal Communications Commission approves its pending merger with Skydance Media, Redstone will reap millions.
On February 6, Redstone told the Paramount board that she wanted to settle Trump’s lawsuit. The next day, Trump doubled his damages claim to $20 billion. As the media reported Redstone’s desire to resolve the case, Trump pounced. On April 13, he asserted on social media that the FCC should impose “the maximum fine and punishment” on CBS and the network “should lose its license.”
The parties have agreed on a mediator, but whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion. The more profound cost is the loss of CBS’ journalistic independence, which became apparent on April 22 when the producer of “60 Minutes” resigned.
In the program’s 57-year history, Bill Owens—who became the “60 Minutes” executive producer in 2019 after 30 years at CBS—was only the third person to run it. Owens’s memo to his staff should be a warning to all of us:
“[O]ver the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
CBS wasn’t Trump’s first media victim.
The Washington Post
In early November 2024, The Washington Post editorial board had signed off on an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But it never ran. Owner Jeff Bezos personally killed it and, for the first time in decades, the paper did not endorse a U.S. presidential candidate.
A few hours after Bezos’s “no endorsement” decision became public, officials from his Blue Origin aerospace company, which has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, met with Trump.
After Trump won the election, Bezos flew to Mar-a-Lago where he and his fiancée dined with the president-elect. Shortly thereafter, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And another Bezos company—Amazon—paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, who personally will receive $28 million.
On February 26, Bezos announced a new rightward shift for the Post: It would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
The paper’s opinion section editor, David Shipley, resigned in response to the change. Prominent columnists followed him out the door, and more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times had an established record of presidential endorsements too—until 2024. Its 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden blasted Trump. But in 2024, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong quashed an editorial that would have endorsed Vice President Harris. As at the Post, columnists and editorial board members resigned in protest, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers.
After the election, Soon-Shiong killed another editorial set to run with this headline: “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.”
Self-censorship is the most effective, enduring, and dangerous method of abridging free speech.
Facebook
More than one-half of Americans “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media. One-third of all adults in the U.S. get their news from Facebook (operated by Meta). Meta’s president Mark Zuckerberg was among the billionaires who traveled to Mar-a-Lago after the election, met with Trump, and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. (With the help of corporate and billionaire megadonors like Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump raised a record $239 million for the fund.)
Then Zuckerberg gave Trump a bigger gift: Meta abandoned third-party fact-checking of Facebook posts. As his rationale, Zuckerberg repeated Trump’s false talking points that fact-checking was “censorship” and reflected an “anti-Trump bias.”
Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats” that Trump had made to him in the past, Trump answered: “Probably.”
Meanwhile, Meta invited Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, to join its board of directors.
PBS and NPR
On April 26, Trump will send Congress his request to halt all funding for public media—including NPR and PBS.
Viktor Orbán’s Playbook—The Trump Sequel
Since his return to power, Hungary’s prime minister has used “muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends,” according to conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Orbán is “attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media.”
Orbán began “working with friendly oligarchs to purchase and transform media companies into conservative stalwarts; directing government advertising budgets to politically-aligned outlets;… and pressuring the holdover state media… to provide more favorable coverage.”
Rufo insists that Hungary “has a media environment at least as competitive as that of many Western nations.” Experienced observers disagree:
Human Rights Watch found that the government is using its near media monopoly to strengthen its hold on democratic institutions… The government’s increased control over the media market is linked to its broader assault on rule of law in Hungary, including undermining judicial independence and state capture of public institutions…
Trump’s attacks on universities, law firms, culture, and the media are all of a piece. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary provides a roadmap of his battle plan and a preview of his end game.
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Mark Zuckerberg (C), CEO of Meta, attends the inauguration ceremony where Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th U.S. President in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2025. (Photo: Shawn Thew / POOL / AFP)
“Rather than learning from its reckless contributions to mass violence in countries including Myanmar and Ethiopia, Meta is instead stripping away important protections that were aimed at preventing any recurrence of such harms.”
An expert on technology and human rights and a survivor of the Rohingya genocide warned Monday that new policies adopted by social-media giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, could incite genocidal violence in the future.
On January 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Meta policies that were widely interpreted as a bid to gain approval from the incoming Trump administration. These included the replacement of fact-checkers with a community notes system, relocating content moderators from California to Texas, and lifting bans on the criticisms of certain groups such as immigrants, women, and transgender individuals.
Zuckerberg touted the changes as an anti-censorship campaign, saying the company was trying to “get back to our roots around free expression” and arguing that “the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward, once again, prioritizing speech.”
“With Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs lining up (literally, in the case of the recent inauguration) behind the new administration’s wide-ranging attacks on human rights, Meta shareholders need to step up and hold the company’s leadership to account to prevent Meta from yet again becoming a conduit for mass violence, or even genocide.”
However, Pat de Brún, head of Big Tech Accountability at Amnesty International, and Maung Sawyeddollah, the founder and executive director of the Rohingya Students’ Network who himself fled violence from the Myanmar military in 2017, said the change in policies would make it even more likely that Facebook or Instagram posts would inflame violence against marginalized communities around the world. While Zuckerberg’s announcement initially only applied to the U.S., the company has suggested it could make similar changes internationally as well.
“Rather than learning from its reckless contributions to mass violence in countries including Myanmar and Ethiopia, Meta is instead stripping away important protections that were aimed at preventing any recurrence of such harms,” de Brún and Sawyeddollah wrote on the Amnesty International website. “In enacting these changes, Meta has effectively declared an open season for hate and harassment targeting its most vulnerable and at-risk people, including trans people, migrants, and refugees.”
Past research has shown that Facebook’s algorithms can promote hateful, false, or racially provocative content in an attempt to increase the amount of time users spend on the site and therefore the company’s profits, sometimes with devastating consequences.
One example is what happened to the Rohingya, as de Brún and Sawyeddollah explained:
We have seen the horrific consequences of Meta’s recklessness before. In 2017, Myanmar security forces undertook a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. A United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Commission concluded in 2018 that Myanmar had committed genocide. In the years leading up to these attacks, Facebook had become an echo chamber of virulent anti-Rohingya hatred. The mass dissemination of dehumanizing anti-Rohingya content poured fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and helped to create an enabling environment for mass violence. In the absence of appropriate safeguards, Facebook’s toxic algorithms intensified a storm of hatred against the Rohingya, which contributed to these atrocities. According to a report by the United Nations, Facebook was instrumental in the radicalization of local populations and the incitement of violence against the Rohingya.
In late January, Sawyeddollah—with the support of Amnesty International, the Open Society Justice Initiative, and Victim Advocates International—filed a whistleblower’s complaint against Meta with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerning Facebook’s role in the Rohingya genocide.
The complaint argued that the company, then registered as Facebook, had known or at least “recklessly disregarded” since 2013 that its algorithm was encouraging the spread of anti-Rohingya hate speech and that its content moderation policies were not sufficient to address the issue. Despite this, it misrepresented the situation to both the SEC and investors in multiple filings.
Now, Sawyeddollah and de Brún are concerned that history could repeat itself unless shareholders and lawmakers take action to counter the power of the tech companies.
“With Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs lining up (literally, in the case of the recent inauguration) behind the new administration’s wide-ranging attacks on human rights, Meta shareholders need to step up and hold the company’s leadership to account to prevent Meta from yet again becoming a conduit for mass violence, or even genocide,” they wrote. “Similarly, legislators and lawmakers in the U.S. must ensure that the SEC retains its neutrality, properly investigate legitimate complaints—such as the one we recently filed, and ensure those who abuse human rights face justice.”
The human rights experts aren’t the only ones concerned about Meta’s new direction. Even employees are sounding the alarm.
“I really think this is a precursor for genocide,” one former employee told Platformer when the new policies were first announced. “We’ve seen it happen. Real people’s lives are actually going to be endangered. I’m just devastated.”
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