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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Mark Zuckerberg was previously forced to confirm that he “not a lizard” during a live online Q&A session. This doesn’t mark the first or last time people have suggested that Facebook’s flipping founder with a slightly robotic approach is some kind of alien. You gotta love the internet.

These days, however, the Meta boss wears a whole new aesthetic: less lizard man, more common-issue billionaire tech bro. Gone is the modest gray T-shirt, worn too tightly by a slender frame; in their place, oversized Ts draped over a bulked-up body, topped off with a gold chain and $900,000 watch. the Julius Caesar’s haircut has also been replaced by a relaxed, casual California curly mop, and Zuckerberg’s skin has gone from deathly pale to “tan” (Americans insist that’s an adjective).

I might even suggest that if you’re standing in the same room as Zuck, you’ll notice he’s wearing a new scent – maybe something musk-y. With his new look comes some new opinions, and they seem to be heavily influenced by a fellow west coast billionaire.

“It’s time to get back to our roots about free expression,” Zuckerberg said a video statement Posted on the Meta website on Tuesday. In it, he explained that the company will scrap the teams of professional fact-checkers it currently employs and replace them with a crowdsourced “community notes” system like Elon Musk’s X. It’s only in the US to begin with, although “he will also work with President Trump to push back governments around the world”.

“Governments and legacy media are pushing censorship even further,” Zuck said (note the use of the term “legacy media”, one of Musk’s favorites). “But now we have an opportunity to restore free expression, and I’m excited to take it.”

I have to start by saying that I have some major issues with the whole concept of fact checking in the context of social media, which I have expressed publicly many times. When a Bloomberg columnist asked for examples of fact-checkers showing political bias, Meta returned three pieces, including a column I wrote in 2021where I argue that fact-checking is often used as censorship. I have it too written positively about community notes, although that system also has its limitations.

And while the online spread of misinformation and disinformation worries me a lot, it’s impossible that fact-checking can be truly objective given that all people have biases. Choices must be made about which claims to review and which to pass on. So the idea that you can completely “fact check” an entire social network has always been a fantasy. And there are few financial incentives for platforms to do this (unless they are worried about fines by regulators).

The problem I have with all of this isn’t so much the content of what’s going on in the Meta. I even thought that moving internal moderation teams from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas — a Democratic city in a predominantly Republican state — to “help dispel concerns that biased employees are too much that censors content”, as Zuckerberg wrote in Threads , a reasonable idea. But the very words of that give away his true motives: it’s not about principles, but about optics and pleasing the soon-to-be resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

My issue with Zuckerberg is his bloodlessness and opportunism. Ask yourself this: is there a chance Zuckerberg will make all these changes to Meta — he also appointed Trump ally Dana White to the board, and replaced Nick Clegg with prominent Republican Joel Kaplan as world affairs president – if Kamala Harris wins in November?

Even Trump himself doesn’t think so. Last year he warned that Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if the Meta boss tried to “plot against” him. Asked Tuesday if Zuckerberg had “directly responded to threats (Trump made) to him in the past” in this fact-checking U-turn, the president-elect replied: “Maybe.”

Zuckerberg can give a great speech about how he no longer resists government demands, but he’s still going – in a different way. In many ways, all of this means that Zuckerberg is less risky than Musk. It was clear in which direction the influence was exerted when the Meta boss went to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He goes where the wind blows.

I would feel more comfortable if the person in charge of the platforms used by two-fifths of the world’s population could show some moral courage and leadership. He may have successfully changed his image, but at least lizards have spines.

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