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Mark Zuckerberg was once forced to confirm that he was “not a lizard” during a live online Q&A session. This is neither the first nor the last time that people have suggested that the pale, somewhat robotic founder of Facebook is some kind of alien. You must love the internet.
But these days, the meta chief is sporting a whole new aesthetic. Not a lizard person, but a more standard billionaire tech buddy. Gone are the modest gray T-shirts that hugged his slim frame. Instead, he wore an oversized T-shirt over his bulky body, topped with a gold chain and a $900,000 watch. The Julius Caesar haircut has also been replaced with a relaxed, California-style, casual curly mop, and Zuckerberg’s skin has become deathly pale and on the verge of being “tanned” (Americans insist this is an adjective). .
I might suggest that if you were standing in the same room as Zach, you would notice that he was wearing a new scent, perhaps a musky scent. Along with his new look, he’s also got some new opinions, which seem to be heavily influenced by a fellow West Coast billionaire.
“It’s time to return to our roots around freedom of expression,” Zuckerberg said in a video statement posted on Meta’s website on Tuesday. In the letter, he explained that the company would eliminate the team of professional fact checkers it currently employs and replace it with a crowd-sourced “community notes” system similar to that used by Elon Musk’s X. This will initially be limited to the United States, but he intends to “work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world.”
“Governments and legacy media are increasingly pushing for censorship,” Zak said (note the use of the term “legacy media,” one of Musk’s favorites). “But now we have the opportunity to reclaim our freedom of expression, and I’m excited to embrace it.”
First of all, I want to say that I have some major problems with the whole concept of fact-checking in the context of social media, and it’s something I’ve expressed publicly many times. When a Bloomberg columnist asked for examples of fact-checkers showing political bias, Mr. Mehta sent back three articles, including a column I wrote in 2021, in which fact-checking is often used as censorship. He claimed that there was. I have actively written about community notes, but that system also has its limitations.
The spread of misinformation and disinformation online is of great concern to me, but given that all humans have biases, fact-checking is nearly impossible to be truly objective. . Choices must be made about which claims to check and which to ignore. So the idea that you could thoroughly “fact-check” an entire social network was always an illusion. And there is little financial incentive for platforms to do so (unless they worry about fines from regulators).
The problem I have with all of this is not the essence of what’s happening in the meta. As Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in the thread, moving his content management team from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas (a Democratic city in a largely Republican state) will allow “biased employees to disproportionately create content.” “It will help dispel concerns that it is being censored.” , which is a pretty smart idea. But the expression itself reveals his true motives. This isn’t about principles, it’s about optics, and it’s about pleasing the soon-to-be residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
My problem with Zuckerberg is his spinelessness and opportunism. Ask yourself. Is it possible that Mr. Zuckerberg will make all these changes at Meta? Mr. Zuckerberg also appointed Mr. Trump ally Dana White to the company’s board and appointed prominent Republican Joel Kaplan to replace Nick Clegg as president of global affairs. If Kamala Harris existed. Did you win in November?
Trump himself doesn’t think so. Last year, he warned that Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if his meth boss “conspired” against him. Asked on Tuesday whether Zuckerberg’s latest fact-checking U-turn was “a direct response to threats[Trump]has made against him in the past,” the president-elect said, “Probably.” answered.
Mr. Zuckerberg may well say he no longer wants to comply with the government’s demands, but he just continues to comply with different demands. In many ways, this means Mr. Zuckerberg is less dangerous than Mr. Musk. When Mehta’s boss went to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, it was clear which direction the influence was reaching. He goes where the wind blows.
I would be more reassured if those in charge of a platform used by two-fifths of the world’s population showed moral courage and leadership. He may have succeeded in changing his image, but at least the lizard has a backbone.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
