The Billionaires Compete for Dear Leader’s Favor Yep: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters. Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting conservative opinions. The recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement, justifying relaxed new content moderation rules on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said, repeating a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact checking. Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, with billions of users on its platforms worldwide, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways I can’t understand what these billionaires think they’ll accomplish with this destruction but it appears to me that they are just playing schoolyard games with each other, currying favor with Trump and trying to outcompete each other. They even announced it on Fox and Friends: Tuesday morning’s announcements seemed like they were addressed directly to Trump, especially since Meta first gave the news exclusively to “Fox & Friends,” one of the president-elect’s favorite TV shows. The company’s newly promoted policy chief Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sat with the Fox co-hosts and fully agreed with the show’s “censorship” versus “freedom” framing. Kaplan’s appearance was the latest sign of Meta recalibrating in…