A quick timeline:

• Last year, Donald Trump threatened to put Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in prison for life.

• Yesterday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp — will stop fact-checking posts on all of those platforms and allow more hateful content. (What could possibly go wrong?)

• A short while later, Trump admitted that Meta’s decision to abandon fact checking was “probably” motivated by his threats of imprisoning Zuckerberg.

To recap, Mark Zuckerberg — currently the third richest person on Earth, with a net worth estimated at $210.9 billion* — is afraid to stand up to Donald Trump.

So now Facebook will join other major “social media” platforms that have devolved into cesspools of misinformation, propaganda, harassment, hate speech, and mob rule.

Of course, Zuckerberg is not alone among tech billionaires in capitulating to Trump.

• Apple CEO Tim Cook just donated $1,000,000 of his own money to Trump’s inaugural committee.

• There’s Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (the second richest person in the world). Amazon is reportedly paying $40 million to license a documentary and limited series about Melania Trump, who will be an executive producer on the documentary.

• There’s Elon Musk (the richest person in the world) very obviously.

• And more.

Now, it would be bad enough if this was just a story about cowardice and these particular men.

But there is something more sinister going on here.

Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and their ilk — the broligarchy that is fast taking over our country and the planet — are bent on getting even richer than they already are by currying favor with Trump in the hopes of essentially eliminating or preventing meaningful regulation of their businesses.

They stand to make untold billions from artificial intelligence, virtual reality, space rockets, and more.

And, to do so, they are apparently ready to debase themselves before Trump and further poison the information sources that billions of humans all around the world rely on for news and connection.

A message to Mark Zuckerberg:

Aren’t you rich enough? You are messing with the lives of literally billions of human beings just so you can become even wealthier. Knock it off.

Click to add your name now.

Thanks for taking action.

For progress,

- Lisa Gilbert & Robert Weissman, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen

*That’s according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: If there are so many billionaires whose fortunes are increasing so rapidly that there’s a “need” to track their wealth in real time, our priorities as a society may be out of whack.
 
 
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