Media veterans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Linda Yaccarino offered starkly different reactions to Meta’s decision to stop fact-checking Facebook and Instagram in separate appearances at CES.
Mark Zuckerberg’s move, announced earlier Tuesday, is widely seen as a bow to pressure from Donald Trump. The reaction to the president-elect and others on the right, who believe social media has censored conservative voices, was a topic at separate CES conversations on two different stages Tuesday in Las Vegas.
Katzenberg, during an appearance at a sidebar conference organized by industry ad consortium OpenAP, said the move by Mark Zuckerberg would only worsen the slide of social media into a sketchy place, opening the door to competition. “There’s no control, there’s no boundaries,” he said. “It’s whatever people want to do, and since we know today a single voice has a megaphone that reaches the world, if you don’t have some sort of set of boundaries and guidelines and rules and regulations,” then a rival could pounce.
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Yaccarino, a former founding member of OpenAP during her days heading up sales at NBCUniversal and now CEO of X, offered a starkly different take during a keynote conversation held across town. “How cool is that?!” she crowed when asked at the top of the conversation for her reaction to the Zuckerberg news. (Watch her full keynote HERE.)
Community Notes, the dramatically scaled-back gesture at content moderation implemented by Elon Musk after he bought Twitter in 2022, is “good for the world,” she declared. “Think about it as this global, collective consciousness keeping each other accountable. … It couldn’t be more validating to see that Mark and Meta recognize that.” X’s message, she added, is, “Mark, Meta: Welcome to the party.”
Appearing on behalf of his investment firm Wndr Co., Katzenberg didn’t name names, but alluded to “what’s happened in the past 24 hours” and argued that “a list” of social brands, including TikTok, Snapchat as well as Meta’s, are losing traction. He said the decline, in his view, of the user experience on social media has made this “a very ripe moment for the next evolution in content and a content platform.” Zuckerberg’s decision “will accelerate this,” he added, and in that sense is an “exciting” development.
What is needed, Katzenberg said, is a scaled platform that is “the opposite of where we’re moving today.”
For inspiration in laying out the case for a new entrant, Katzenberg harkened back to his time at Disney saying its “singularity” and “self-imposed” adherence to its values is notably absent in social media. People, especially families, are hungering for it, he argued. “If somebody comes up with the next version of that, that has enough appeal, that is sexy enough, that is interesting enough,” it could gain traction.
Joe Marchese, former head of ad sales at Fox and co-founder and general partner at Human Ventures, said on the OpenAP panel that a brand like Disney has earned “the permission to earn people’s attention.” Social media companies, by contrast, “are platforms, where anything can be online and they have no standards.”
Pushing back on Katzenberg’s belief that change is nigh after more than a decade of dominance by largely the same cohort of major social players, Marchese highlighted a recent example from streaming. New ad players like Netflix and Amazon are not reinventing advertising (at least not yet) but are mostly replicating the traditional TV ad sales playbook of 15- and 30-second spots.
Michael Kassan, the former head of UTA’s MediaLink who now runs consulting firm 3C Ventures, said he sees what’s happening with Meta and other social players is a “Sarbanes-Oxley moment” in media. The reference was to a Congressional Act passed in the wake of Enron’s collapse. Designed to curb financial frauds and misdeeds, it was seen by corporate and financial interests as going way too far. “Do I think that we became too woke? Yes. Do I think we’re watching over-correction? Yes,” Kassan said. “And that’s the dilemma, is it becomes a chilling effect because of your overcorrection.”
Katzenberg, Hollywood’s leading Democratic champion and a major fundraiser for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, clarified that he’s “not looking at it through a political lens. I’m looking at it from a consumer … and I’m just confident that there is an opportunity. It’s not a correction. It’s an opportunity. It’s a white space that somebody is going to come with imagination and creativity and a set of values that define it as that place and I think people will come pouring into it in a way that will make the next TikTok, the next YouTube.”
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