2025: Year of the insufferable tech bro

A number of years ago while working for a national newspaper, my colleagues and I were given a presentation on the importance of Facebook. While many of us still harboured quaint notions about our role as journalists speaking truth to power, those in charge had other ideas – we were now mere ‘content creators’ helping to drive ‘engagement’ with readers on social media.

Suffice it to say, the sort of article which does well on Facebook often involves very little digging, fact-checking or time spent writing it up, all of which were major bonuses to those in charge of the finances. But those tech bros are capricious sorts, so when FB tweaked its algorithm to downgrade ‘news’, the paper’s plan was scuppered.

Now, just as Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has sacked the site’s own fact-checkers, judging them to have been “too politically biased”. Wearing his trademark vacant stare and a wristwatch reported to have cost $900,000, Zuckerberg also said US content review teams would be moved from Democratic California to Republican Texas, adding that parent company Meta would work with “President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”. Asked whether Zuckerberg was responding to threats he had made against him in the past, Trump said: “Probably”. 

Personally, I gave up long ago expecting Meta to do the right thing, a company which was implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, failed to prevent a terrorist livestreaming an attack on two New Zealand mosques which left 50 dead, and currently stands accused of not doing enough to stop paedophiles sharing child abuse images on WhatsApp. Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life after viewing posts about self-harm and suicide on Meta-owned Instagram, said he was “dismayed” by the latest decision – which currently only applies in the US – to scale back some content moderation.

Under the cover of “free speech”, Zuckerberg is now following the example of Trump’s favourite tech baron, Elon Musk, who has turned X (formerly Twitter) into a hellscape of hate speak and disinformation, much of it spread by him personally. With the Rubicon well and truly crossed and already receding in the far distance, X is now a safe space for bigots, conspiracists and provocateurs. But Musk’s personal attack on Jess Phillips – he called her a “rape genocide apologist” – still had the power to shock.

Musk’s vitriol came as he characteristically waded into a topic he appeared to know very little about – the abuse of young girls by grooming gangs in a number of English towns. A series of scandals made worse by institutional failure, the cases have become a cause célèbre for the far-right which has sought to exploit the survivors for political purposes. 

In 2025, that sort of morally repugnant political opportunism has gone mainstream with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and the contemptible Robert Jenrick quick to jump on the bandwagon. Jenrick, whose tweets were reposted by Musk to his 200 million-plus followers, was skewered on the Today programme when presenter Nick Robinson reminded him that he had not once raised the issue in the Commons as an MP. 

Where once newspaper editors sought ‘engagement’ on Twitter and Facebook, now it’s politicians who seek the imprimatur of Musk and his followers. Zuckerberg’s decision to reject facts to win favour with Trump is a further depressing sign of where we’re headed in the next 12 months.