Taves: Silicon Valley tech CEOs becoming Trump’s hostages. Be afraid.

Donald Trump publicly threatened to send Mark Zuckerberg CEO of the world s largest social organization to prison last summer He did it twice All I can say is that if I m elected President we will pursue Vote Fraudsters at levels never seen before and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time then-candidate Trump wrote on Truth Social adding We already know who you are DON T DO IT ZUCKERBUCKS be careful A month later Trump s just-published book included this warning Zuckerberg would bring his very nice wife to dinners be as nice as anyone could be while inevitably plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT We are watching him closely and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison as will others who cheat in the Presidential Ballot Related Articles Amid office domain challenges long-delayed -million-square-foot Santa Clara growth makes a big pivot Bay Area lawmaker pushes to require AI companies to release safety policies Apple loses top AI models executive to Mark Zuckerberg s hiring spree Tax Silicon Valley Big Tech to rescue BART and other Bay Area transit How a GOP rift over tech regulation doomed a ban on state AI laws in Trump s tax bill Trump s threats were not subtle They were not open to interpretation Do what Trump wants or else Message received Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan got the message loud and clear Since November Meta has downscaled its diversity initiatives placed Trump ally UFC CEO Dana White on its board weakened hate-speech policies making it easier to dehumanize Trump targets like immigrants and the LGBTQ group deleted its fact-checking unit which Trump loathed moved its content moderation association from liberal California to conservative Texas and paid Trump million to end a lawsuit it might ve won without settling There are other curious changes The day after Trump s second inauguration posts including the hashtag democrats were not searchable across Meta s apps In late April a week after the federal executive s anti-trust situation against Meta began Bay Area News Group communicated that Zuckerberg and Chan s charity was cutting off a tuition-free private school serving mostly low-income Latino students in East Palo Alto That had to warm White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller s heart And in May reporting revealed the charity had dropped commitments to housing and homelessness nonprofits including a multitude of focused on MAGA s biggest bugaboos racial equity and economic inclusion But Zuckerberg isn t the only one paying abject obeisance to the president Since Trump threatened Meta s CEO with a lifetime prison sentence the heads of other giants in Silicon Valley Alphabet Amazon and Apple are also becoming high-paid hostages as they scramble to please the president and shield themselves from his chaotic wrath Their firms have created the greater part potent tools of intelligence and manipulation the world has ever seen Now Americans should assume the companies lucrative levers of surveillance and persuasion are at the disposal if not outright organization of a vindictive president who s increasingly unbound by judicial and other checks on his power Evidence of the companies submission to the priorities of the president and the conservative way of life wars that sustain him grows daily Unconvincing conversions Look past the yachts mansions jets and billions in the bank The omnipotence of tech leaders is over Unlike the valley s clearly committed techno-libertarian true-believers think Peter Thiel David Sacks Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk the conservative conversions of Zuckerberg Amazon s Jeff Bezos Alphabet s Sundar Pichai and Apple s Tim Cook are not convincing Right before the November ballot Bezos broke the -year streak of his Washington Post by blocking the paper from endorsing anyone for president In early January Amazon declared it was halting its DEI operation In late February Bezos posted on X that he was ditching his newspaper s opinion-section commitment to publishing diverse viewpoints and instead focus on favorite GOP mantras personal liberties and free markets To be fair the Post s opinion pages have continued to criticize the administration And in April right after Trump called Bezos Amazon dropped plans to show customers how much the president s tariffs were going to cost them Pichai has been a club competitor too In late January three months before Trump s Justice Department began an anti-trust scenario against Google the search giant agreed to change its maps to reflect Trump s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico Genuflecting to the president s anti-DEI obsession Google also changed its calendar to hide Pride Month Black History Month Holocaust Remembrance Day Indigenous People s Month and Hispanic Heritage Month from its default settings Cook hasn t bowed down quite as far and Trump has targeted Apple with tariff threats as a end costing the company billions However Cook has certainly tried bending the knee Right after a February meeting with the president Apple released a billion expansion in the U S including a massive expenditure in ruby red Texas Just as he intended Trump took credit for Apple s commitment Break the glass Americans should take note and be afraid If these tech titans are acting this deferential in populace it s frightening to think what they re promising Trump behind closed doors I m absolutely worried mentioned Mark Lemley professor at Stanford Law School where he directs its Law Science and Apparatus operation We need to reckon with the fact that we don t live in a sort of free and open country anymore We are well on the road to authoritarianism Lemley has a unique window into Silicon Valley in the age of Trump The internationally renowned intellectual property specialist and tech-company co-founder represented Meta as outside counsel until January But after witnessing Zuckerberg s complete personality shift and descent into toxic masculinity Lemley fired Meta as a client What majority of concerns him is the power Silicon Valley companies could give Trump to restrict speech without having to violate First Amendment protections Though they re weak and getting weaker the courts remain the only barrier to an outright authoritarian Trump presidency but Silicon Valley gives Trump an end run around them How The largest tech platforms are dictators of our digital lives They have complete control over their platforms If Meta decides it wants to shadow ban Trump s opponents on Instagram that is hide a few users content without their knowledge thereby minimizing their influence there s no law stopping it If Alphabet wants to change its Google search algorithm which Trump has repeatedly lambasted as rigged to only include positive news about Republicans and negative news about Democrats or vice versa it can do that If Meta and Alphabet want to obstruct liberal groups from organizing protests on their platforms they can do that too All legally A deferential Silicon Valley gives Trump unprecedented power to squash speech and surveil his opponents while still maintaining the pretense of a free open democratic country Just say no No country demands and receives as much access to Meta Alphabet and Apple user figures as the U S Our federal regime gained access to million accounts over the last decade A lot of our privacy rests on tech companies saying no to the regime when the authorities comes with an illegal order or something that seems fishy disclosed Cindy Cohn executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation a defender of digital privacy and free speech But if tech companies stop defending their users from illegal or suspicious orders it can really empower the regime to do a lot of surveillance and a lot of repression Cohn persons Trump is cajoling big tech companies for nefarious ends though she doesn t want to call their billionaire CEOs hostages yet They re going in willingly and then they re going to get stuck just like the first time you go to the mafia she stated You think you re in charge and it s only over time you realize that you re not Max Taves is deputy opinion editor of Bay Area News Group Reach him a mtaves bayareanewsgroup com