What does Meta diluting its moderation policies and throwing out its diversity programs mean for us in Europe?

Recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaned further towards the tech oligarch Elon Musk by announcing fact checkers across Meta’s US operations would be fired and diversity policies would be rolled back.

However, for us in Europe, strict social media rules are still very much in place.

So, what does this all mean for us?

On Breakfast Business, populism and politics commentator and former UK Government advisor Adam Schwartz said the Meta news is “very surprising for a lot of people”.

“I think a lot of people who had stopped using X over the last year or so really had sort of looked to other platforms, such as Threads, which, of course, Zuckerberg hosts, as you know, partly sort of a refuge from [Musk’s policies],” he said.

“I think the fact that he's doing this is very shocking for a lot of people, but I think it really tries to cement what we're really seeing, which is this alliance between Maga Trumpist authoritarianism with US tech oligarchs - which I think is a phenomenally dangerous force in the world.

“Because essentially, you are bringing together public interest with private interests of tech oligarchs.

“So I think it's very concerning for a lot of reasons to do with corruption but also to do with our discourse and our democracy as well.

“I think we'll have huge ramifications for not only democracies, but in fact, Governments themselves, and also the way that, of course, that we all engage with each other.”

Reluctance in EU

Mr Schwartz said there has been a lot of “reluctance” from European Governments to respond to the alignment between Trump and the US tech companies.

He said this is “partly not to give Zuckerberg and Musk the oxygen that they crave”, but also because they're very concerned about the fact that they are strong allies of President-elect Trump, and therefore they're “scared of the ramifications” - particularly the possibility of facing “US tariffs in response to European action” against X and Meta.

“I think what we're seeing is actually more willingness to speak out against it, particularly over the last couple of weeks, as we've seen, you know, this kind of massive disinformation really swarm all over social media,” he said.

“I think really, European Governments should actually look to the example of Brazil that we saw last year, where they actually shut down X all over Brazil for a couple of months, until they saw that actually, Elon Musk was willing to comply,” he said.

“In the end, he complied with all of the requirements of the Brazilian Supreme Court under domestic legislation in terms of trying to appoint legal representatives for the issues they were dealing with, but also in terms of the fines that they were facing as well.”

"Defend democracy"

Mr Schwartz said Governments have a responsibility to “defend democracy” and what we are seeing is from these tech companies is a “direct attempt to undermine and destabilise democratically elected Western Governments”.

“I think really [European Governments] do have a priority to prioritise democracy and that requires taking strong action against X and Meta,” he said.

He said the fear of tariffs cannot be more than the responsibility to defend democracy.

Mr Schwartz said there are “so many possibilities and opportunities” for European countries to fall out with Trump over various issues over the next four years.

Listen back here:

The Facebook homepage is seen on a computer screen. 09 January, 2025. Credit: Sipa USA/Alamy Live News