Democracy is the theme of 2024 – and that is Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest test yet
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At the end of polling day after the US elections in 2020, Facebook staff finally allowed themselves to breathe a sigh of relief. Joe Biden had ousted Donald Trump – and Facebook had snuffed out efforts of foreign operatives to influence voters via social media.
The company even put out a report in December hailing the success of its efforts, noting: “Elections changed. So did Facebook.”
But just weeks later, Facebook was grappling with an unprecedented crisis. On January 6, rioters were storming the US Capitol building and Trump appeared to be praising their actions via Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg finally took action, indefinitely suspending the former President’s account.
Those chaotic days are recounted as part of Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse, an upcoming documentary charting the billionaire founder’s meteoric rise. The social network Zuckerberg founded from a Harvard dorm room turns 20 in February. Now rebranded as Meta, the billionaire’s digital kingdom counts almost 4 billion people as its citizens. Zuckerberg, who in Facebook’s early days ended company meetings by chanting “domination”, has profound influence over the digital lives of more than half the world’s population.
The Sky documentary recounts Zuckerberg’s journey from a student coding an awkward “hot or not” website for his college to running a $900bn company. It also explores how politicians have used Facebook’s wealth of data and vast reach to supercharge their messages, fuelling Trump’s rise to power in 2016 and the internal turmoil this caused at the company.
“When I first joined, movies were being made, the founders were on the cover of Time magazine,” Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former public policy director, tells the filmmakers. “Now you are being told you destroyed democracy.”
Eight years later and Zuckerberg, who turns 40 this year and is worth $125bn, faces his toughest political test yet. 2024 is set to be the biggest year for democratic elections in history.
“It will be seen as a very high risk and sensitive moment for the company, there is a very intense scrutiny on what they are doing,” says Lord Allan of Hallam, who was Facebook’s European policy head until 2019. “The platforms will be getting kicked in both directions – there will be people telling them they are suppressing too much content, and people telling them they are not taking enough down.”
Since the last US election, the Facebook founder has unleashed a rebrand of his social media empire. As well as rechristening the company Meta, he has pursued a focus on virtual reality technologies.
But it is votes in the US, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ukraine and the UK that are likely to dominate the agenda for Zuckerberg this year.
The US Presidential election will take place in November, with primaries to select the Republican candidate beginning in Iowa next week. “You have this historic year for elections, which has a lot more they need to look at than in 2020,” Harbath tells The Telegraph.
The wave of elections comes after Zuckerberg unleashed a “year of efficiency” at the social network in 2023 – cutting more than 21,000 jobs at the company - after its share price fell.
A spokesman for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an activist group, claimed Meta had “hollowed out its election integrity team” and was facing “twin threats” of disinformation and AI-powered deep fakes. CNN reported that members of Meta’s disinformation teams, who had previously dealt with US elections, were cut last year.
Meta disputes the claim and insists its elections team has been expanded.
A spokesman said: “We have around 40,000 people globally working on safety and security, and protecting the 2024 elections is one of our top priorities. Our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry and with each election we incorporate the lessons we’ve learned to help stay ahead of emerging threats.”
In November, Sir Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, wrote: “No tech company does more or invests more to protect elections online than Meta – not just during election periods but at all times.” He added Meta had invested more than $20bn to tackle such issues since 2016.
But many of its decisions have proved divisive. Having dramatically suspended President Trump in the wake of the 2020 election, Meta reinstated the former US president last January as he ramped up a new presidential bid. In 2022, it also quietly shifted its policy on bogus claims of election fraud. Previously banned, it will now allow adverts that claim previous elections were “rigged” or “stolen” to appear, a key pillar of Trump’s campaign.
Several other social media companies have reigned back their content moderation policies since the last US election – not least Elon Musk’s revamped Twitter – amid concerns curbs on free expression went too far during the pandemic.
“Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded,” Clegg said in January last year, on allowing Trump to return to the site. “There is a significant debate about how social media companies should approach content posted on their platforms.”
“Out of the fog of what was 2020, the last four years we’ve seen a lot of people start to question: ‘Wait, did we go too far?’” says Harbath.
Meta faces pressure from both left and right, from those who claim it is censoring their views, and those who say its policies will enable disinformation to spread. In 2021, the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen alleged the company’s products “stoke division and weaken democracy”.
“Facebook can change” she added, “but is clearly not going to do so on its own.”
In this year’s elections, tackling disinformation is likely to be made all the more challenging by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which can be used to generate synthetic audio, images and videos. AI bots are also being used to generate fake news stories. “You add AI as an accelerant to all this,” says Harbath.
This risk is “not a hypothetical threat,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief executive officer, wrote in evidence to the US Senate in November 2023. “Deceptive uses of AI-generated content are already occurring in the US presidential election and democratic elections around the world.”
During Slovakia’s elections in September, deep fake audio of a candidate, which discussed buying votes and rigging the election, spread widely online just days before polling. In response to the rise of AI, Meta will require advertisers to disclose if their adverts use altered or synthetic images in political ads.
Jerome Pesenti, who led Meta’s AI team until 2022, says the tech company takes election interference “very seriously”. He adds Meta had a team dedicated to deepfake detection, but setting up technology to block such AI fakes was difficult.
Counterintuitively, the number of deepfakes in circulation remains “extremely low… so it’s actually hard to create an automated system that deals with it effectively”. Mostly, Meta had relied on humans to take down content that had gone viral.
Pesenti adds: “I am sure the next presidential election will be top of mind [for Meta]”.
However, Katie Harbath says she remains concerned about the challenges posed by a number of elections in smaller countries.
“What the companies have not been very specific about is how much attention are they going to pay to … a lot of these ‘smaller elections’,” she says. “How much attention will the companies be able to pay to those, where frankly the threat of violence is much higher?”
The tech company has already started to uncover efforts to subvert this year’s elections. In November, Facebook announced it had uncovered a network of 4,800 accounts, originating in China, that had sought to impersonate everyday American Facebook users to amplify political division.
Meta has said it has 100 partners around the world to review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages.
Already, Zuckerberg is facing crunch decisions. Last summer, it faced calls from its own review board, the Oversight Board, to suspend Cambodia’s former Prime Minister over claims he was using Facebook to threaten opponents. It rejected the demands.
After banishing Trump in such dramatic circumstances following the January 6 riots three years ago, Meta will be “incredibly hesitant to deplatform any leading candidates in the middle of an election year,” Harbath says.
With 4 billion people soon to go to the polls, the same number that use its apps, Zuckerberg’s metaverse kingdom may prove more influential on the world’s democracies than ever before. With Zuckerberg guaranteed enduring control, however, the company itself remains very much a one-man dictatorship.
Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse, is on Sky Documentaries at 9pm on January 11
