Meta founder and CEO
Mark Zuckerberg wore a navy-blue T-shirt with a dropped shoulder, bell sleeve and a gold chain necklace, dangling a large charm, to his history-making video presentation on Tuesday morning.
Adding to his reinvented “lewk” was a head of shaggy orange curls and slightly tanned, orange-y skin, a contrast to his usual pallor.
And yet, despite the easygoing (1970s?)
fashion flourishes, his “free speech” announcement was all-business -- if your business is being a 1950s dystopian cult leader.
Indeed, the clash of the words vs. the look was
head-scratching. Set against a backdrop of sauna-type wood, Zuck appeared less alien-strongman and more like my mom’s Aunt Selma in Boca.
Selma taught me that a dropped shoulder and
elbow-length bell sleeve were very slimming for the upper arms. She was also big on “statement” pieces around the neck.
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If I sound too arch, it’s because I’m still
dealing with the whiplash of Zuck's extreme MAGA-ward turn, and the very slippery words he used to describe it four years to the day after the Jan 6 insurrection.
But really, why be shocked by
his transparent hypocrisy?
Over the last decade, Zuck has proven himself a shape-shifting candle in Trump’s wind.
Of course, we remember his response back in 2020,
when he announced that his platforms were placing a block on Donald J. Trump’s accounts because the then-outgoing president had called to incite “[a] violent insurrection against a
democratically elected government."
Meanwhile, there’s more than enough lying and hypocrisy to go around. Obviously, Zuckerberg was affected by Trump’s Truth Social post in April,
when the future prez wrote that he would go after “ELECTION FRAUDSTERS at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for a long time.”
“We already know who you
are," then-candidate Trump posted. And like the Wicked Witch writing “Surrender Dorothy” in the sky, he added, “Don’t do it! ZUCKERBERGS be careful!”
Rather than
fighting back, responding that threats like that are anti-American, Zuck sucked it up, wanting to join ‘em rather than beat ‘em in the face of overwhelming dominion.
Aaron Sorkin,
the screenwriter of “The Social Network,” who is now writing a movie about the insurrection, “blames” Facebook for Jan. 6. On a podcast episode of “The Town with
Matthew Belloni,” Sorkin said he believes Facebook has been perfecting its algorithm to promote content that divides people “because that is what will increase engagement.”
He added,“There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth.”
In this context, the Meta
chairman’s latest anti-integrity move is not-so-shocking. Zuck somehow kept an even straighter face than usual on Tuesday when he announced that FB’s "complex systems" had "too
many mistakes and too much censorship."
Conveniently, he announced that “the recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we're
restoring free expression on our platforms [and am] going to get rid of fact-checkers.”
Free speech by getting rid of fact-checkers? That’s newspeak. It’s a war-is-peace
world after all.
Or it’s Meta’s way of aligning with the mighty Musk, who these days is a shadow president, now sticking his nose deeply into world affairs.
In ending
third-party fact-checking, Zuck even alluded to what Musk does, saying he’d replace it with a more hands-off content-moderation policy in which users police one another through “community
notes” -- just like X.
There’s also the Musk-imitating bit of moving his moderation team from California to Trump-friendly Texas.
CNN’s
media guy Brian Stelter translated Zuck’s changes to mean that when tech CEOs “are favoring or preferring a certain kind of speech, they‘re favoring their own speech or their own
political preferences and not the actual entire user or the community‘s speech.”
What’s more, Musk’s “community notes” decision sent advertisers
fleeing X’s platform, along with many users. As Joe Mandese put it in his Red, White & Blog column “[I]f history repeats itself, watch for big brand spending to
decline on Meta's platforms over time due to its content moderation policy changes, not because of politics, but because the invisible hand of the ad marketplace simply doesn't want to raise itself in
unsafe and unsavory places.”
We remember Musk giving the finger to the advertising community as a result, which I guess is better than telling advertisers to “f--- themselves in
the face.”
Still, in Zuck’s case, we’re talking money, not bias. Bottom line, during an interview on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe," New York University Professor Scott Galloway
pointed out that with this move, Zuckerberg “gets to save maybe upwards of $5 billion, which is how much they spent on their safety and security department. And [with] a price/earnings ratio of
30, that’s potentially a $150 billion increase in market capitalization.”
The move won’t fix the plaforms’ underlying problems at all. But that’s some powerful
economics.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised within the next four years (or less) to see Mark make another video appearance to explain his latest shocking 180.
By then, maybe
he’ll be setting off his Meta glasses with a pony tail and linen caftan.