Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a tear these past few days, taking after Elon Musk, the man he nearly fought in a cage match not even two years ago. Last week, Meta rolled out a series of policy changes in response to our post-election cultural moment, announcing the roll back first of its fact checking and content moderation efforts and subsequently various DEI initiatives.
The announcements prompted significant liberal backlash, particularly given Zuckerbergās framing of the issues as current Meta leadership pushing back against company overreach in the first half of the decade whenā¦ he also ran the company.
For others, the loss of programs that they perceived as symbolic at best was not worth getting worked up over.
In the B.T. days ā Before Trump ā journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship ā a sharp contrast to edgier and less experienced journalists in the Trump era who would later claim to own the disinformation beat. Perhaps because demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left, the journalists who selected into the subfield tended to be especially left of center. –Silver Bulletin
To roll out this PR campaign, Zuckerberg sat down for a long interview with – who else? – Joe Rogan where he talked about these changes, and his take on Meta in the Joe Biden era.
āWe had organizations looking into us that weren’t even involved in Social Media. We had the CFPB looking after us. I didn’t even know what that is. It’s some financial institution that Elizabeth Warren set up. We’re not a bank, what does Meta have to do with this? They came up with some theory and were trying really hard to make it work.
…
I think that the American tech industry is a bright spot in the US economy, it’s a strategic advantage, and it should be part of the US’ strategy going forward to defend that.
I am optimistic about that with Trump, I think he just wants the US to win. At least in the US we have rule of law, you get your day in court, and we usually win, but other countries don’t have that. If the US wants to remain strong, the US has to have a role in defending their tech.”
Zuckerberg claimed that members of the Biden administration would curse out the Meta team for not sufficiently removing misinformation, forcing their hand – an anecdote that some like Barstool Sports owner Dave Portnoy felt pointed to Zuckerbergās lack of principled decision-making in the first place.
Others yet called out Zuckerberg and those supporting these policy changes for their double standards when it comes to Donald Trump.
Maybe the most headlines-generating comments involved Zuckerberg calling for a return of āmasculine energyā to Meta.
“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it. It’s like you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy. I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing.”
Metaās policy changes and Zuckerbergās comments are the latest – albeit, maybe most dramatic – example of the cultural changes taking place across society but particularly in the tech industry.
This news cycle reignited the age-old debate: was The Social Network too kind to Mark Zuckerberg, or more prescient than anybody at the time realized?
Well, at least one person answered that question directlyā¦
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