Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-Morphosis
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Um, when I do, it's usually because it's caused some kind of disruption in my life or given me problems for that day. And so I can't say that I have had any positive reflections on masculine energy recently. Shira is Shira Frankel, a New York Times reporter. And I was asking her that question because of this guy. All these forms of energy are good. And I think having a culture that

like celebrates the aggression a bit more, has its own merits that are really positive. And that has been kind of a positive experience for me. That's Mark Zuckerberg, bro-ing out with Joe Rogan last week, saying corporate culture has been neutered and needs more masculine energy.

I mean, that was one of many revelations we had this week about what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about the world. And for me, as someone who's looked at Facebook for years now and looked at what they represent as a company, it's just interesting that as his company has steadily really shed female employees and female executives, for him to say we need more masculine energy is kind of, you know, it's an interesting choice.

Shira co-wrote a book about Facebook with her fellow Times reporter, Cecilia Kong, and says this Zuck, the one we saw on Rogan, that is the real Zuck. He spoke on that show the way people describe him speaking in backyard barbecues and dinner parties.

And I think this was a real mask off moment for him where he embraced a lot of these kind of libertarian ideals that he's held for years. He embraced all the stuff that he's kind of taken from the fighting gyms that he's a part of out here in the Bay Area. And these ideas that have been circulating for him for a long time. And we got to finally hear them instead of, I think, these carefully crafted PR statements that he's made.

for really the last decade. So you're saying this wasn't a pivot. This was just Mark. This was just Mark. If anything, the last 10 years have been a pivot of what he thought the public needed to hear, what he thought was going to keep his company safe, what people around him were kind of telling him to say. This is what Mark has, I think, always sounded like when he speaks to people close to him.

Today on the show, masculine energy, trips to Mar-a-Lago, and a whole lot of changes at Meta. Mark Zuckerberg goes mask off. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. Have you heard about double nomics? It's okay if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practiced by Discover.

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Over the past few months and weeks, Zuckerberg has been driving a number of significant changes to how Meta does business. Most importantly, doing away with how the company moderates content. This all really started with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that he wanted to do away with the fact-checking program, which has really been a cornerstone of Meta's approach to keeping misinformation, conspiracy theories, and generally just kind of like false ideas off of their platforms.

For years, Meta has had a group of human fact-checkers all over the world assessing information on its platforms.

And so Mark starts off by saying, I changed my mind. I don't think these fact checkers are good. I think they're partisan. I think they've allowed partisan ideas to influence their way of thinking. And so I'm just doing away with the program. Instead, I'm going to introduce what X has, which is community notes, the idea that we should kind of be fact checking ourselves. I think that if you speak to academics and experts who study this, they say that community notes are problematic.

But you're essentially allowing the general public to kind of decide what they want to check and what they want to make notes on. It's a huge shift in what type of content people will see and how content will be marked as potentially false. Then there seem to be some other changes like to their diversity, equity and inclusion program.

Right. He then goes right on along to say, and actually, I think that here at Facebook, we've been approaching a lot of things wrong. I think we've looked at diversity wrong. We're going to be getting rid of our diversity and inclusion program. They did away with a lot of the protections that they had previously offered the LGBTQ community. They actually released very briefly, they released this internal memo that was like, okay, we're now going to allow people to say, and then there was quite a bit of kind of derogatory language about the LGBTQ community.

And it was so controversial inside Meta that they had to take it down because people were leaking it. People were sharing it. I mean, I think there was something like four reporters at the New York Times that immediately had people send us this and say, oh, my God, have you seen this? Mark Zuckerberg is allowing people to say this on Facebook now. People in the company were furious and they saw it as yet another moment where Mark was saying, actually, I pretended that DEI was something I cared about for a long time, but I don't.

Is there a thread, you think, that ties these statements and actions together? I think the thread is Mark's really sort of entrenched libertarian view of the world that he had when he was a young man in his early 20s, that free expression should rule and people shouldn't be limited on what they can say. He took this absolutist view of free speech, that people like Peter Thiel, who was an early mentor to him, were really pushing to Mark in his early 20s.

And he embraced it. And he said, actually, this thing I thought when I was, you know, Harvard College dropout and launching my company that really people should say what they want on the Internet and we should allow people to police themselves and all this. This is what I really think I believe now. And I have taken too much responsibility for what appears on Meta. People pushed me and pushed me to do this. And I did it. And I regret it all. And now I'm going back.

I guess notably there are a few rules left in place, including some rules about anti-Semitism. Right. And I think that's really interesting. And if I was on the Rogan podcast with Mark Zuckerberg, I would love to ask him that because he did maintain a lot of the rules about anti-Semitism. He created a kind of carve out for that from speaking to people close to Mark Zuckerberg.

I understand it's because it's a subject that's close to his heart, which sort of begs the question of like, well, are you or aren't you a free speech absolutist? Because if you are, if this is an ideal, then shouldn't it be applied evenly? And if it's not, if you personally, Mark Zuckerberg, are affected by anti-Semitism, why wouldn't you think the LGBTQ community would be affected by the hate speech targeting them? It's a loophole that he created really based on his own preferences here.

Then there's this other kind of bit of corporate news that there are going to be layoffs. The apparently bottom 5% of performers. What do we know about those? So to put it in context, Facebook has, Meta has had mass layoffs. Yeah.

This is yet another sort of wave of layoffs that's affecting the company. But given the timing, there are a lot of people in meta who think they're going to use this to get rid of anybody that's spoken out against the DEI changes, against the fact checking changes, against Mark's new direction for the company. Because a lot of these employees, when they complained internally, they got docked. Their personal files got docked for that.

And so if you're laying off the bottom 5% and you just put a little, I mean, they don't actually put an X in someone's file, but if you recently cited them in their file and said their behavior was inappropriate in the workplace, I don't know, that might put you in the bottom 5%. There are also some other changes to the company that I think are worth noting. Board appointments, for example.

So we saw board appointments like Dana White, who's the head of a fighting organization, right? Someone who he has hung out with, who he goes to watch fights with. Yeah.

This is actually really a continuation of a trend that started a few years ago, where if you were, if you pushed back against Mark Zuckerberg, if you were the type of person who was like, actually, I don't know about that idea. I don't know about that shift to the metaverse. That might not be great. And this approach to AI you're taking, I'm not so sure. And hey, maybe you should reconsider some of your policies. If you were that voice in the room that was pushing back against

There was no space left for you at Facebook. And so we've seen the slow progression of people leaving the company who were the voices in the room that wanted to question Mark's decision making. And they've been replaced by the yes men, by the people close to Mark, by the people who share his kind of vision for the company.

I think there have been, over the last few weeks, as more and more tech CEOs kind of bend the knee toward the incoming Trump administration, there have been two camps of thinking about this. One is that this is a series of chief executives trying to protect their investments, their companies, you know, from fraud.

investigation or from having their mergers blocked, like that they're doing this tactically. And then there's this other camp that, no, this is true belief. Where would you put Mark Zuckerberg? I think Mark Zuckerberg is a combination of a true believer who also sees a moment in time where he needs to bend the knee to the White House. I think that this, much of this kind of speaks to his actual beliefs and

He was very affected, as we know from people close to him, by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests that happened at Meta. He felt that they went too far. He felt that employees had...

you know, gotten too confident in pushing back against the company. And that, coupled with the pandemic, coupled with COVID, really left Mark in this camp of people that was like, oh, but maybe woke politics have gone too far. Maybe the woke movement has affected companies too much. So he does think those things. And it's a very convenient moment to play them up. When we come back, what's Meta going to look like now when you log in? Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life.

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Hello, Slate listeners. This is Felix Salmon from Slate Money. I'm sure you've been seeing the headlines from Los Angeles. The wildfires there, the insurance situation there, the prisoners working on the ground as firefighters. So...

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I think people are focusing on celebrities right now, partly because the bigger macro problems are really overwhelming and terrifying. Where California needs to go from here. And how we should be thinking about the use of inmates as firefighters and whether this choice given to inmates is really a choice at all. It's an offer you can't refuse. Listen to the dire costs of the L.A. fires on Slate Money today.

Well, let's talk about some of those key moments that seem so important to shifting at least the way Zuckerberg publicly talks about the company. In 2016, obviously, Facebook became the target of many controversies, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, misinformation about the U.S. presidential election. And there was a lot of pushback against Facebook in particular. How did he react to that?

Those incidents, to being hauled in front of Congress repeatedly. Mark Zuckerberg panicked. It was a horrible moment for him personally and for the company. He was seeing all these public opinion polls that people held him personally responsible for the 2016 elections, for the misinformation, for the Russian disinformation campaign.

the public looked at him as someone who had failed the public. And so Mark was freaking out and he was turning to people close to him like Sheryl Sandberg and saying, what do I do? You're the adult in the room. You know Washington, D.C. You are supposed to be the one here that understands kind of like PR and policy. You tell me what to do. And Sheryl Sandberg and other people close to her said to him, well, you've got to really go out on a PR offensive. You're going to visit all 50 states and take photos with

you know, dairy farmers and auto workers in Detroit. And you're going to be a real American and you're going to listen and you're going to promise people that you go to sleep every night, you know, crying into your pillow about what happened in 2016. I mean, this was like that last thing I said, by the way, was verbatim from what a PR person told me at the time, which was that Mark Zuckerberg cried at night over what had happened. It was at the time their main PR message was that Mark was turning over a new leaf and

taking responsibility for misinformation, disinformation on Facebook. It's so interesting to hear him talk to Joe Rogan about that time because he

I remember him testifying to Congress saying things like, well, I can't recall or I don't remember that particular moment. But he talks to Rogan about it. He has perfect recall of how he felt, what he thought. He said he was ill-prepared. He listened to the media. It was so interesting to get this window into, I guess, maybe what he was thinking all along.

Right. He blames the media quite a bit. His distaste for the media, mainstream media as he calls it, really comes through. I think some of that is because he can't say that he also blames the people that were close to him at the time. And I think that that's something that he's just decided won't play well in the public. But yeah, I do think it's interesting that the Mark Zuckerberg of 2016 and 2017, who was hauled before Congress many times...

Acted like he couldn't recall how strategic decisions were made and why he chose to do one thing over another. And yet, there he was at the Rogan show, the podcast, and talking with quite good recollection of facts and details about how hard those decisions were for him. Then another turning point. The COVID-19 pandemic begins. And the government asks him to take action. What are they requesting and how does he feel about it?

So we know because Meta Zuckerberg himself has released quite a few of these emails that the government reaches out to Facebook and to other social media companies. Right. And they say, hey, we're in the middle of a pandemic. We need your help. Right. We need it's a public health crisis. If people are sharing misinformation such as, you know, bleach products.

can be used as a treatment for COVID. That was one thing that was circulating early on in the pandemic. Or things like, oh, well, if you just eat an onion a day, then you are immune to getting COVID, right? There was a lot that was circulating and the government was basically reaching out and saying, please take this down. They were saying it forcibly, to be clear. There were people who are public health officials who were emailing Facebook and really pleading with them like, hey, we're

We need your help. Please be a responsible social media company. Take this down. And to be clear, the government didn't have authority to tell Mark Zuckerberg to take anything down. There was no executive order given. It wasn't a law that was passed. They were asking forcibly.

And I think that's an important distinction because some of the conversation around this has suggested that the government forced Meta to do something or forced the company known as Twitter back then to do something. They don't have that power. They can ask and they can be like, hey, we're really mad at you. Please take this down. Or they can remove the word please, but they cannot force them to do anything. Ultimately, it was Meta's decision, Mark Zuckerberg's decision, whether to take something down.

Well, that's such an interesting thing, because on the one hand, you can say, like, wait a minute, doesn't Zuckerberg have a point about some of this? Like, should the government be interfering in this company's business? On the other hand, the CEO is a CEO and can say no.

Right. I mean, I think that that would have been an interesting discussion for us to have maybe in 2020 or 2021, right, in the middle of the pandemic. For Mark Zuckerberg as a CEO, maybe it would have been interesting if at the time he came out and said, they're asking me to remove this. I feel complicated about it because it seems like they're telling me to take down a joke. But, you know, this is what the government's asking. And we think it's important to comply because some people take jokes literally.

There's a moment in 2021 where President Biden makes this comment that platforms like Facebook are killing people. They're killing people. I mean, it really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people. I wonder how that landed for Mark.

So I actually remember that moment so vividly because I called a colleague who was supposed to be in Facebook's offices at that time. They had an interview scheduled. And I was like, you got to tell me, like, are people freaking out? And they were like, you don't understand. They won't let me in the building. They won't let me come in. And so then I immediately started texting and calling people that worked at Facebook. And they were livid.

They were like, seeing red, mad. How dare he? That kind of language, so unhelpful. We've done what they ask. We have taken down this stuff. Mark is...

pissed, pissed at these comments. Because for him, it was really an echo of what had happened years ago in Myanmar, right? Where Facebook had been set, had been told by the UN, you were part of helping fuel this genocide. A literal genocide. A literal genocide, right? And that, to be clear, I do think Myanmar actually did keep Mark Zuckerberg awake at night. I do think that was a moment where a lot of executives were like, oh, shit.

We were maybe potentially responsible for a genocide here. So here we are years later. And once again, Facebook's being told that they kill people. Mark Zuckerberg is being told, hey, your company led to the death of people.

And he's mad because he's like, wait a minute. I didn't want to take this stuff down. And I did it because you told me to, even though it kind of my inner voice was telling me this was wrong. And so he does what a lot of people do, which is he kind of goes, well, you know, F you. I was right to begin with. I shouldn't have done all that. I should have stuck to my guns and not taken down those memes and those jokes because you don't see all the work I've done. And there's a similar kind of

parallel version of this with the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the platforms do take down and then put back up. It's like the inverse, you know, and they're just like, we can't win. We can't win with you people. And that's what you hear over and over again from people in Mark's inner circle. We can't win.

Facebook cannot win. Mark Zuckerberg cannot win. He did everything people told him to do for years and years, and everyone still hates him. And by everyone, he's really thinking about the mainstream media, some Democratic senators who have repeatedly kind of called him out. He's really thinking of a specific group of people. And he kind of, Mark Zuckerberg kind of sits there and goes, well, if I can't win, why am I doing this?

So what will the meta platforms look like now? I mean, will the user experience change? Is it suddenly going to be like going on X? I don't know, but it could be. I think that the changes to removing the fact checkers, and I will add that there was another change that was revealed, I think, just this week by Casey Newton. Facebook created these kind of like automated programs that classify things.

that let them quickly say, oh, that's a piece of misinformation. That's falling under this classification of, let's say, like,

Anti-Muslim hate speech in Myanmar, right? It's classified. And it lets them find it quickly and take it down. And they're doing away with that system, which might sound like a minor thing. But again, as a reporter who's covered the company for, oh God, it's been a decade now, that was held up to me as one of the most important and key programs to let them quickly find misinformation and conspiracy theories and take it down.

Man, how do users make sense of that? Because I'm just like, you know what? I just I want to open up my Instagram and oh, look, Shira's kids are so cute. And I want to see I want to see the, you know, the children of friends who live far away and maybe get served a sweater that I'm probably not going to buy, but get to think about for a while. And that's it.

Same. I want the same Danish shoe company to advertise me the metallic cowboy boots that I've been seeing for a year and a half and I refuse to buy because they're like $300. I want to see my friend's kids. I want to see my friends. And now when I open up my Facebook account,

I'm shown all this really bizarre material from groups I'm not a part of. And the other day I opened it and there was this like anti-vaccine mom's group in the north of California that they were telling me I should join. Like it is not my friend's content, which is, you know, a shame, at least for me, because that's what I wanted to see. I think it's increasingly going to be the kind of viral posts that go viral because they're too insane to kind of like not look at and click at.

And I don't know if people here remember the 2016 Facebook, but if you opened it, you would see like aliens have kidnapped Hillary Clinton. You know, it was really bizarro content. And I don't know. I don't know if that's what Facebook's going to start looking like in the next six months to a year. There's already been a small but notable exodus of users from some of the meta platforms, not unlike what we saw with Twitter. Yeah.

One difference is that Meta is just so much larger. Meta says it has more than 3 billion daily users. And Meta's companies, for better or worse, are intertwined with Mark Zuckerberg. He has welded his person to the company. Mark Zuckerberg is Meta and Meta is Mark Zuckerberg.

This is not, you know, you look at other companies that are of that size, like Amazon and Google and Apple. And today, the founders of those companies are not in the same way, inextricably, you know, I and the company are one in the same. Jeff Bezos is out there living his life, doing his thing, you know, being in Miami and whatever.

and living it up on yachts, right? And, you know, I think a lot of people in the public wouldn't be able to tell you who the head of Google is at this point or who the head of Apple. I mean, techies would, but the general public, I'm not so sure. And so Mark Zuckerberg's kind of standing there as the person whose entire identity you can't, you would not hear his name in public without, you know, meta or Facebook being attached to it. And that's important to him. He has cultivated that. He has intentionally not gone out

and linked himself to other projects or linked himself to other companies because he wants history to remember him like this. It is so, so important to Mark that history remembers him. Shira Frankel, thank you so much for your reporting and for talking with me. It's my pleasure. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Shaina Roth. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne.

Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate, and TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard and you want to support our independent journalism, the number one thing to do is join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, including this one, plus no paywall on the Slate site. Just go to slate.com slash whatnextplus to sign up. All right, we'll be back on Sunday. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.

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