Donald Trump publicly threatened to send Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the world’s largest social network, to prison last summer.
He did it twice.
“All I can say is that if I’m elected President, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” then-candidate Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding, “We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!”
A month later, Trump’s just-published book included this warning:
“(Zuckerberg) 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. … 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.”
Trump’s threats were not subtle. They were not open to interpretation. Do what Trump wants — or else.
Message received
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, got the message loud and clear.
Since November, Meta has downscaled its diversity initiatives; placed Trump ally UFC CEO Dana White on its board; weakened hate-speech policies, making it easier to dehumanize Trump targets like immigrants and the LGBTQ community; deleted its fact-checking team (which Trump loathed); moved its content moderation team from liberal California to conservative Texas; and paid Trump $25 million to end a lawsuit it might’ve won without settling.
There are other curious changes:
The day after Trump’s second inauguration posts including the hashtag “#democrats” were not searchable across Meta’s apps. In late April, a week after the federal government’s anti-trust case against Meta began, Bay Area News Group reported that Zuckerberg and Chan’s charity was cutting off a tuition-free private school serving mostly low-income Latino students in East Palo Alto. That had to warm White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s heart. And in May, reporting revealed the charity had dropped commitments to housing and homelessness nonprofits, including many focused on MAGA’s biggest bugaboos: racial equity and economic inclusion.
But Zuckerberg isn’t the only one paying abject obeisance to the president.
Since Trump threatened Meta’s CEO with a lifetime prison sentence, the heads of other giants in Silicon Valley — Alphabet, Amazon and Apple — are also becoming high-paid hostages as they scramble to please the president and shield themselves from his chaotic wrath.
Their firms have created the most potent tools of intelligence and manipulation the world has ever seen. Now, Americans should assume the companies’ lucrative levers of surveillance and persuasion are at the disposal, if not outright service, of a vindictive president, who’s increasingly unbound by judicial and other checks on his power.
Evidence of the companies’ submission to the priorities of the president and the conservative culture wars that sustain him grows daily.
Unconvincing conversions
Look past the yachts, mansions, jets and billions in the bank. The omnipotence of tech leaders is over. Unlike the valley’s clearly committed techno-libertarian true-believers — think Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk — the conservative conversions of Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook are not convincing.
Right before the November election, Bezos broke the 36-year streak of his Washington Post by blocking the paper from endorsing anyone for president. In early January, Amazon announced it was halting its DEI program. In late February, Bezos posted on X that he was ditching his newspaper’s opinion-section commitment to publishing diverse viewpoints and instead focus on favorite GOP mantras: personal liberties and free markets. (To be fair, the Post’s opinion pages have continued to criticize the administration.) And in April, right after Trump called Bezos, Amazon dropped plans to show customers how much the president’s tariffs were going to cost them.
Pichai has been a team player, too. In late January — three months before Trump’s Justice Department began an anti-trust case against Google — the search giant agreed to change its maps to reflect Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Genuflecting to the president’s anti-DEI obsession, Google also changed its calendar to hide Pride Month, Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Indigenous People’s Month and Hispanic Heritage Month from its default settings.
Cook hasn’t bowed down quite as far, and Trump has targeted Apple with tariff threats as a result, costing the company billions. However, Cook has certainly tried bending the knee. Right after a February meeting with the president, Apple announced a $500 billion expansion in the U.S., including a massive investment in ruby red Texas. Just as he intended, Trump took credit for Apple’s investment.
Break the glass
Americans should take note — and be afraid.
If these tech titans are acting this deferential in public, it’s frightening to think what they’re promising Trump behind closed doors.
“I’m absolutely worried,” said Mark Lemley, professor at Stanford Law School, where he directs its Law, Science and Technology program. “We need to reckon with the fact that we don’t live in a sort of free and open country anymore. … We are well on the road to authoritarianism.”
Lemley has a unique window into Silicon Valley in the age of Trump 2.0. The internationally renowned intellectual property specialist and tech-company co-founder represented Meta as outside counsel until January. But after witnessing Zuckerberg’s “complete personality shift” and “descent into toxic masculinity,” Lemley fired Meta as a client.
What most concerns him is the power Silicon Valley companies could give Trump to restrict speech without having to violate First Amendment protections.
Though they’re weak and getting weaker, the courts remain the only barrier to an outright authoritarian Trump presidency; but Silicon Valley gives Trump an end run around them.
How?
The largest tech platforms are dictators of our digital lives. They have complete control over their platforms. If Meta decides it wants to shadow ban Trump’s opponents on Instagram — that is, hide some users’ content without their knowledge, thereby minimizing their influence — there’s no law stopping it. If Alphabet wants to change its Google search algorithm — which Trump has repeatedly lambasted as rigged — to only include positive news about Republicans and negative news about Democrats (or vice versa), it can do that. If Meta and Alphabet want to obstruct liberal groups from organizing protests on their platforms, they can do that, too.
All legally.
A deferential Silicon Valley gives Trump unprecedented power to squash speech and surveil his opponents while still maintaining the pretense of a free, open, democratic country.
Just say no
No country demands and receives as much access to Meta, Alphabet and Apple user data as the U.S. Our federal government gained access to 3.1 million accounts over the last decade.
“A lot of our privacy … rests on tech companies saying ‘no’ to the government when the government comes with an illegal order — or something that seems fishy,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of digital privacy and free speech.
But if tech companies stop defending their users from illegal or suspicious orders, “it can really empower the government to do a lot of surveillance and a lot of repression.”
Cohn suspects Trump is cajoling big tech companies for nefarious ends, though she doesn’t want to call their billionaire CEOs hostages — yet.
“They’re going in willingly, and then they’re going to get stuck, just like the first time you go to the mafia,” she said. “You think you’re in charge, and it’s only over time you realize that you’re not.”
Max Taves is deputy opinion editor of Bay Area News Group. Reach him a mtaves@bayareanewsgroup.com.