SAUNDERS: Facebook ends fact-checking. Only Biden is not smiling

WASHINGTON

Big Tech has gone topsy-turvy in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s November victory.

Four years ago, Facebook and Instagram banned Trump posts, and the ban lasted two years. This year, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg not only met with Trump, but also announced Meta is getting rid of fact-checking and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies. Facilities managers have been instructed to remove tampon dispensers from the men’s rooms, The New York Times reported.

A corporate giant that censored conservatives and other critics is about to open its steely doors — because Zuckerberg recognizes that America is at “a cultural tipping point.”

President Joe Biden disapproved of Zuckerberg’s announcement, which he called “really shameful.”

Americans are sick of being told what to think by tech workers who live and work in a walled-off world of Google buses and catered in-office meals.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression around Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg noted in his video announcement. So Zuckerberg is moving Meta’s U.S. based content review and “Trust and Safety” operations from California to Texas. Elon Musk announced plans to move X to the Lone Star State last year.

Oh, and there’s a new guy on the Meta board who is not a coastal elite: mixed martial arts titan and UFC CEO Dana White. From Vegas, baby.

Apparently, there is little love lost between the Biden White House and Big Tech leaders who complain that Team Biden leaned on them to squelch unwanted content by using COVID-19 as a pretext for censorship. In July 2021, Biden charged that platforms like Facebook were “killing people.” Fact check: Bogus.

“In 2021,” Zuckerberg later wrote in a letter to the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee, “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”

Literally, Team Biden couldn’t take a joke.

On the podcast he co-hosts, tech billionaire Marc Andreessen spoke of the “repression” tech entrepreneurs experienced under Biden World’s scaredy-pants watch. When Trump won, Andreessen offered, “It felt like a boot off the throat. Every morning I wake up happier than the day before.”

It’s no wonder then that Andreessen and Musk publicly backed Trump before his Nov. 5 victory.

Many news reports have framed Silicon Valley’s campaign to befriend Trump as a self-serving exercise in kissing up to power.

My profession had no such qualms in 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., sailed into the White House with the “Facebook effect” at his back.

Then the marriage of tech and politics was hailed as the dawning of the Age of Aquarius as peace ruled the planet, love steered the stars and young people voted for Democrats.

Facebook was started in 2004. Obama won the White House in 2008 and 2012.

But then a funny thing happened. In 2016, Donald Trump won the White House after he pretty much owned Twitter. There was little celebration about social media helping a candidate for president win— because young “tech bros” weren’t interested in turning out the vote for the right.

So when Biden won the White House four years later, it looked like all would be right inside tech world. But it turns out, Trump always got social media, while Biden saw the free-wheeling platforms as the enemy — and the bros learned he was not their friend.

Information, you see, is like toothpaste. Once it’s out of the tube, it’s nearly impossible to put it back.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.