By EUGENIO BUCCI*
Zuckerberg climbed into the back of the extremist Trumpist truck, without shame, without limping and with a jolt. Meta came out of its silicon closet to enter the frenzied fanaticism
Now it’s out in the open. After Mark Zuckerberg’s statement on Tuesday, announcing that he will join forces with Donald Trump to fight against platform regulation projects, projects that he calls “censorship,” there’s no way to hide it anymore. Following the example of Elon Musk, owner of “X,” formerly known as Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg has climbed into the back of Trumpism’s extremist truck, without shame, without hesitation, and with a jolt. Meta has come out of its silicon closet to join the frantic fanaticism.
Were they certain? Yes, they were. Sooner or sooner, the makeup would run. And it did. It’s all over your face. Now, no one can claim that the misinformation and hate speech industrially propagated by the Meta machinery were accidents along the way. No. Promoting Trumpism and all of its ideology – or all of its bestiary – was not a side effect, but the purpose of the global monopoly conglomerate led by Mark Zuckerbert. Detail: in his video, which made headlines yesterday in newspapers around the world, he appears wearing a black shirt. Was it a slip of the tongue? Or intentional?
Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, has considerable firepower – the bellicose metaphor is a bonus –, a little more than this newspaper, for example, or all the Brazilian newspapers combined, or even all the newspapers on the planet. We are talking about companies whose market value is in the trillions of dollars. These are the infamous big tech. One by one, they drop their mask of impartiality, objectivity and commitment to facts and reveal their essential nature: they are propaganda and manipulation factories in the service of authoritarianism. They have nothing and never had anything to do with education or knowledge.
Speaking big tech, things aren't looking any better at Jeff Bezos' Amazon. On Saturday, Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator Ann Telnaes announced her resignation from the The Washington Post, now controlled by Jeff Bezos. Ann Telnaes accused the newspaper of censoring a cartoon in which she criticized the subservience of billionaires to Donald Trump. In the cartoon, it is possible to recognize, among the tycoons who bow down to the new president of the United States, the frightened face of the owner of Amazon. The Washington Post vetoed. It was another darkly bad sign that the billionaires of the world's largest democracy are abandoning their commitment to the foundations of liberalism and are bowing down to brutality.
Brutality is the word, albeit a worn-out one. Barbarity is the word, albeit a worn-out one. Donald Trump has nothing to do with the so-called “American dream” or with the so-called “founding fathers” of the federation that, more than two centuries ago, gave rise to the most powerful state of our time. Donald Trump is an untimely, late and worse fascist.
The adjective “fascist,” which scholars previously tried to avoid so as not to incur anachronisms and conceptual inaccuracies, has ended up imposing itself. Things need to be named. Recently, the great American historian Robert Paxton, one of those who resisted using the word, revised his position and admitted: what is happening in the United States does indeed need to be classified as fascism, albeit with the usual methodological cautions.
What's going on there is more, much more, than an authoritarian hiccup, and the big tech are at the heart of the inflection. More than instrumental transmission belts, they are the laboratory that synthesizes the obscurantist mentality, the violent impulses, the vectors of hatred, intolerance, or, let us be precise, fascism in its post-Mussolini guise.
The ambitions of territorial expansionism that Donald Trump has insisted on in such a scandalous way confirm this characterization. They are reminiscent, distantly or not so distantly, of the very old category of “living space”. The promise of occupying neighboring or distant countries to expand power is a hallmark of 19th century Bonapartism, 20th century Nazism and, now, 21st century Trumpism. This time, big tech are the soul and weapon of business: they are to Donald Trump what cinema and radio were to Adolf Hitler. With just one difference: they are more decisive today than cinema and radio were back then.
From now on, the debate on “content moderation”, “fact-checking agencies”, “media literacy” and “combating fake news” will be in the background. It was clear that the big tech They don't want to talk about it anymore. With anyone. They want to replace the information age with the disinformation age, because they know that their only chance of continuing in gigantism depends on the validity of authoritarian orders, with a totalitarian bias.
Just as the press can only thrive in a democracy, social platforms can only thrive in a tyranny. It is a matter of life and death. For them and for each one of us. What they need to guarantee to live in the luxury they have established themselves in, without being accountable to anyone other than Donald Trump, is what we, citizens (at least for now), need to fight against so as not to die.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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