Mark Zuckerberg can see the finish line. He is so close to getting what he has wanted for years. The U.S. government is trying to give him the greatest gift he could possibly imagine: A TikTok ban. This would be U.S. intervention against the most credible competitor Meta has seen in years, and U.S. intervention to kill a superior product to the benefit of an American company.
On Joe Rogan last week, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government “should be defending its companies, not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies.” And yet, in this case, the U.S. government—the Biden administration that he has been railing against as he pivots to MAGA—has squarely aimed its spear at Meta’s biggest, most credible competitor in a move that would greatly benefit Zuckerberg and his company.
Everything that Zuckerberg is doing right now–Meta’s shift rightward; its dehumanizing of immigrants and LGBTQ+ users and employees; its move away from diversity-focused hiring; his trips to Mar-a-Lago; removing tampons from the men’s bathrooms at Meta offices; the inauguration party–should be seen in the broader context that Meta would benefit enormously from a TikTok ban and that Donald Trump, who will be sworn in as president on Monday, is the one person who, at this point, credibly has the ability to reverse a ban.
Zuckerberg’s very public pledge of fealty to Trump has multiple purposes, of course. Trump previously threatened to put Zuckerberg in jail, and he is obviously cozying up to an administration that he hopes will not regulate his companies. But a TikTok ban is the biggest potential prize. Trump has Zuckerberg by his apparently very masculine balls, and is positioning himself as being the ultimate decider on what will happen to TikTok.
Zuckerberg’s political persuasions and positions have always shifted with whatever suits his companies most at that moment in time, which is something that became more clear as I went back through many hours of Congressional testimony and political speeches that Zuckerberg has given over the last few years. One thing that has not changed, however, is Zuckerberg’s obsession with using the specter of Chinese internet dominance and competition to both avoid consequences for his own company and to lay the groundwork for government regulation on Chinese platforms like TikTok.
Meta has denied directly lobbying on the TikTok ban, but the company spent a record sum lobbying in 2024, including on “Homeland Security” topics. In March 2022, the Washington Post reported that Meta paid a firm called Targeted Victory to push the narrative that TikTok is dangerous to children. And Zuckerberg himself has spent the last five years painting a picture to Congress that his monopolistic company faces great competition, actually, from Chinese companies and more importantly from China itself. This story has served Meta extraordinarily well, as he has been able to distract from Meta’s myriad privacy violations and monopolistic actions by saying it would be worse if China wins. Meta is not a monopoly, he says. It is a company fighting on behalf of America against China and Chinese companies for the soul of the internet.
Zuckerberg made this argument most clear at a speech at Georgetown University in 2019.
“The larger question about the future of our global internet. You know China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and it’s now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries,” Zuckerberg said. “Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside of China has been defined by American platforms with free expression values. But there’s no guarantee that those values will win out. A decade ago almost all of the major internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top 10 are Chinese and we’re beginning to see this in social media too.”
“While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these same protests are censored even here in the US,” he added.
A few days after Zuckerberg’s Georgetown speech, Zuckerberg had a seven-hour hearing before the House Financial Services Committee in which he stated that an entire cryprocurrency system Facebook was spinning up called Libra was so incredibly important to U.S. financial and cultural dominance that if Congress imposed restrictions on it, Xi Jinping would win. (Libra, later called Diem and then sold to Silvergate Bank in 2022, is now dead.)
“I think there are completely valid questions about how a project like this would impact America’s financial leadership, our ability to impose sanctions around the world, our oversight of the financial system in a lot of places,” Zuckerberg said. “And I just think that we need to trade off and think about and weigh any risks of a new system against what I think are surely risks if a Chinese financial system becomes the standard.”
This general reasoning from Zuckerberg prompted Rep. Anthony Gonzalez to say that “you’re painting this as if we don’t do it, China will do it. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find somebody who is more of a hawk on China in this committee. So I agree with that. What I don’t think is the right frame is ‘If Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don’t do it, then Xi Jinping will.’ Like, this isn’t Mark Zuckerberg versus Xi Jinping … Facebook doing this, frankly, I don’t trust it and I don’t believe the American people trust it.”
This endeavor of watching Zuckerberg’s old testimony made clear that he lied repeatedly on Joe Rogan last week on all sorts of things. For example, he practically begged Congress to regulate Meta in July 2020—during the Trump administration—while groveling about how seriously the company takes things like COVID misinformation and election integrity. On Rogan, he suggested such concerns were foisted upon him by the media and the Biden administration. Zuckerberg also seemed dumbfounded on Rogan that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Elizabeth Warren were interested in his company, which again, notoriously attempted to launch an entirely new global monetary system with Libra.
“We had organizations that were looking into us that were, like, not really involved with social media,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “Like, I think, like, the CFPB, like, this financial I don't even know what it stands for. It's the, it's the financial organization, that Elizabeth Warren had set up. And it's basically like, we're not a bank.”
During another Congressional hearing in 2018, Zuckerberg’s prepared notes said “Break Up FB? U.S. tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.” And, again, in 2020 he told Congress: “If you look at where the top technology companies come from, the vast majority a decade ago were America. Today, almost half are Chinese … Facebook stands for a set of basic principles. Giving people voice and economic opportunity. Keeping people safe. Upholding democratic traditions like freedom of expression and voting and enabling an open and competitive marketplace. These are fundamental values for most of us, but not for everyone in the world. Not every company we compete with or the countries they represent. As global competition increases, there is no guarantee that our values will win out.”
Meta, and, specifically, Instagram Reels, would be the most obvious beneficiary of a TikTok ban. TikTok has now what Facebook once had, and which Instagram has but is losing: Deep cultural relevance and a generation of users who love it. Facebook and Instagram still have billions of users, but AI spam, a terrible algorithm that seemingly universally surfaces cringe, and a huge number of bots and people who post like their brains are made of mashed potatoes have made both Facebook and Instagram feel like platforms that people remain on begrudgingly, not because they actually want to be there.
Zuckerberg’s general narrative that Meta faces intense competition from China and that Chinese social media companies cannot be trusted persisted across all of his Congressional hearings, and he has repeatedly used the specter of China exporting its cultural values via social media as a shield to deflect from his own company’s monopolistic tendencies, its privacy violations, and its harms against children. He has used this not only to avoid regulation of his company and his platforms, but also to seed the ground for what ultimately became the TikTok ban. Zuckerberg can see the prize. The question is whether, by kissing Trump’s ass, he will actually finally get it.
