From the DIY submersible implosion to the mercenary mutiny in Russia, with a segue via Donald Trump’s self-incriminatory recordings, there has been a lot of news competing for your time recently. But did you happen to spot the headline about technology CEOs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg squaring up to cage fight each other?
When this crossed my screen on June 22 I had to reread it twice, and double-check that I was in fact on the BBC News website and not some parody corner of the interwebs. I even went off to inspect their respective posts, the original sources in this oddball news.
“The story speaks for itself,” a Meta spokesperson told the BBC when asked to confirm, and it certainly does. Yup. The two grown-ass billionaires — educated fathers and businessmen with Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in their pockets — are discussing coming to actual blows to settle a rift, and presumably also for entertainment.
The posts started late last week, but the story continues to get updates. So far, Ultimate Fight Champion president Dana White says he has been in contact with both men and they are “absolutely dead serious”. And “former UFC star Chael Sonnen” told “MMA Hour” — whatever those two things are — that the bout could draw record audiences.
It is silly, petty and — if it ever happens — likely to be entirely bloodless, but I can also see why the idea has captivated a certain millennial-aged audience who grew up on MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch clay-mation show and have drunk the crypto bro Kool-Aid, where posturing for street cred isn’t deeply cringeworthy.
It’s not that I don’t get the appeal, it’s just so unbelievably weird that actual journalists are writing this about actual titans, erm, giants of industry.
For Washington Post writers Naomi Nix and Nitasha Tiku this is part of the “elonization” of Zuckerberg, an attempt by Meta’s chief “to make himself cool again” and “more relevant to a tech elite taken with the online antagonism and offline antics of Elon Musk”. Methinks “again” is doing a lot of heavy lifting herein, but what do I know?
Their point is that those in the know say Zuckerberg’s recent appearances on popular podcasts (with Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan), and this whole cage match malarkey, is part of a “strategy to pitch Zuckerberg as visionary innovator to a tech-savvy audience losing its enthusiasm for his social media empire”.
Or perhaps the whole thing is, as Vox suggests, “a means of distracting from news they might want to bury”. This includes Meta’s ongoing battle with news media. This time the battle at hand is going down in Canada, where a law (Bill C-18, aka the Online News Act) was recently passed mandating technology companies to pay the media sources of content when they carry links to them. In response, Meta said they’d be testing means of “end[ing] news availability in Canada”.
Meta’s statement from late last week reads: “We have repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada.”
Despite these strong words we have a precedent that suggests negotiations might follow. Meta (and Google) faced a similar legal challenge to their use of domestic news sources in Australia. After a brief news blackout on the Facebook feeds, Meta made a deal with the government Down Under, allowing it to negotiate compensation directly with media outlets. Reuters reports that “in the year following the law taking effect, Meta and Google have paid some A$200m ($134m) annually to Australian news outlets, according to a report from the former chair of Australia’s competition regulator”.
That was just the start. Even if they don’t acquiesce to the Canadians right now, such challenges will keep coming, like the bipartisan bill being floated in California that would see online platforms with a certain number of active monthly users required to share the wealth with media outlets. Or New Zealand’s plans around content attribution and value, or those of Europe.
This “social media vs the media” type skirmish is something I’ve covered in this column over the past few years, but it is only one category of legal challenge aimed at curtailing the reach and power of these kinds of big tech companies. Honestly, it feels like there is almost never a month without a new one to be found.
Three days ago Malaysia promised to take legal action against Meta over what it calls “undesirable” posts, which it believes should be moderated and removed from the platform. Australian authorities said last week that Twitter had to account for its efforts to tackle online hate or face fines, following growing “toxicity and hate” on the platform since Musk took charge.
Australia’s eSafety commissioner and a former Twitter executive Julie Inman Grant said Twitter could be fined as much as $475,000 a day if it doesn’t comply with an online safety law introduced in 2021. Those are just two of many recent examples.
I think there was a time when we were collectively so enamoured and impressed with technology and social media that these firms enjoyed a certain inscrutability and free rein. That time is long gone, and the likes of Twitter and Meta are being hauled into courts and governmental hearings so often one wonders when their executives will have time for hand-to-hand combat.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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