Much has been said about the sudden arrival of Mark Zuckerberg, severe courtship in the incoming Trump administration—doing away with fact-checking in favor of X-style crowdsourcing (nobody cares about fact-checks, but community notes doesn’t seem better); going to Fox News and Joe Rogan to say Facebook is all about free speech now; removing content restrictions so that it is now acceptable to write on Facebook that gay people are mentally ill.

Listening to him, the difficult pivot felt disingenuous, like Zuckerberg would do what was politically expedient at any given time. Facebook is a private company and can decide what content is or isn’t allowed on its services—the same way Twitter executives used to debate requests from the White House to remove content, which could leave on Facebook whatever it wants. But in his first administration, President Trump was constantly threatened send Zuckerberg to jail of Facebook censoring conservative content, and Meta still has an FTC anti-trust trial coming up in April. Zuckerberg’s proposals seem like a ploy to make all of Meta’s problems go away in a few years.

And Zuckerberg is lucky because Facebook is one of the most effective advertising products ever created, and that puts him in an interesting position. It’s easy for advertisers to drop Twitter (now X) because it’s not really a good place to advertise—the service doesn’t need real names like Facebook, and it’s never collected a lot of useful traffic. information on its users. This is a big part of why FTC chairwoman Lina Khan went after Meta in the first place—it strengthened its power by buying or copying competitors. Whatever you think of Zuckerberg, he is one of the best entrepreneurs in recent history.

Big brands like Dell or Coca-Cola advertise on Twitter to reach the beach elite, while Facebook is always successful with local, small businesses because they can target an ad for sandals. in person directly, and get an almost guaranteed return-put $1 into Facebook advertisements, generate $2 in sales. This is why Facebook, Google, and Amazon are now talking more than half throughout the digital advertising market. They are extremely effective. X is always smaller with roughly 300 million active users compared to Meta’s more than 3 billion; even Snapchat and Pinterest are bigger than X. Boycotts on Meta don’t happen the same way they did on X.

In general, advertisers do not want their brands to appear next to divisive or hateful content. Coca-Cola doesn’t want to be placed next to Neo-Nazi imagery or be seen as indirectly endorsing such content by advertising on a platform that allows it—if you think of Diet Coke, the company wants that you can imagine the warm feelings of polar bears and Christmas; Volkswagen didn’t want anything to do with Hitler, and so on and so forth. To be sure, Meta won’t completely eliminate content moderation, but it will be less restrictive.

There is something new article on Financial Times assessing the potential backfire of Meta’s new stance. Here is an excerpt:

Critics argue that crowdsourced fact-checking efforts are slower to flag lies and conspiracies than professional, trained individuals, and can be manipulated by users.

Lou Paskalis, chief executive of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory and a former media executive at Bank of America, said Meta’s community notes shift “creates headwinds for risk-averse marketers”, adding that some ” will reduce their trust” in Meta as a result.

Some advertising executives described feeling “nervous” and sought more information from the platform about exactly how to implement the changes.

“Brands are entering a new world where established operating rules are no longer reliable,” said Patrick Reid, chief executive of the Imagination group, the marketing agency.

Should Meta sue advertisers for continuing to fund platforms like this Musk made X? Probably not. In the end, money talks and if advertisers still see a positive return on their investment, they will continue to advertise on Facebook and Instagram. It’s the same with CEOs of big companies—when they print money for their companies, investors forgive many sins.

Advertisers may not be abandoning Meta, but that shouldn’t be interpreted as an endorsement of Zuckerberg’s moves. They don’t leave the Meta because it hurts their lanes.