Meta’s virtue signaler-in-chief has lots to say

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, posted a long thread on Meta’s Twitter copycat, Threads, about updates to Meta’s content moderation policy, beginning a busy week for Meta employees and users alike. Here are my thoughts on what he said.

It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms.

Great heavens.

1/ Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.

As many others have said, I have never seen Meta fact-check posts that truly deserved fact-checking. It put a label on my thread saying Trump would win the election after the failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, but I’ve never seen a fact check implemented where it mattered. Community Notes, on the other hand, is phenomenal — albeit a stolen idea from Twitter’s Birdwatch, now X’s Community Notes. But the Zuckerberg of four years ago wouldn’t have decided to scrap fact-checking entirely — his instinct would’ve instead been to double-down and improve Meta’s machine learning to tag bad posts automatically. Meta is a technology company, and Zuckerberg has historically solved even its biggest social issues with more technology. To go all natural selection, “every man for himself” mode rings alarm bells.

Meta’s platforms suffer from severe misinformation, though probably not worse than the cesspool that is X. Facebook is inundated with some of the worst racism, sexism, misogyny, and hateful speech that consistently uses fake, fabricated information as “evidence” for its claims. President Biden’s administration admonished Meta — then Facebook — in 2021 for spreading vaccine misinformation; the president said the company was “killing people.” Twitter proactively removed most vaccine misinformation in 2021, but Meta sat on its hands until the Biden administration rang them up and asked them to take it down as it interfered with a crucial component of the government’s pandemic response. (More on this later.)

2/ Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

It’s hard to tell what Zuckerberg means from just this post alone, but Casey Newton at Platformer describes the changes well:

For example, the new policy now allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”

So in addition to being able to call gay people insane on Facebook, you can now also say that gay people don’t belong in the military, or that trans people shouldn’t be able to use the bathroom of their choice, or blame COVID-19 on Chinese people, according to this round-up in Wired. (You can also now call women household objects and property, per CNN.) The company also (why not?) removed a sentence from its policy explaining that hateful speech can “promote offline violence.”

So, “out of touch with mainstream discourse” directly translates to being allowed to say “women are household objects.” Here’s an experiment for Zuckerberg, who has a wife and three daughters: Go to the middle of Fifth Avenue and shout, “Women are household slaves!” He’ll be punched to death, and that’ll be the end of his tenure as the world’s second-most annoying billionaire. But on Facebook, such speech is sanctioned by the platform owner — you might even be promoted for it because Zuckerberg seems keen on bringing more “masculine energy” to his company. That’s not “mainstream discourse”; it’s flat-out misogyny.

This is where it became apparent to me that Zuckerberg’s new speech policy — which, according to The New York Times, he whipped up in weeks without consulting his staff after a retreat to Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump’s home — is meant to be awful. It was engineered to be racist, sexist, and homophobic. It wasn’t created in the interest of free speech; it’s a capitulation to Trump and his supporters. The relationship between the president-elect and Zuckerberg has been tenuous, to put it lightly, but the new content policy is designed to repair it.

Trump has threatened Zuckerberg with jail time on numerous occasions for donating millions of dollars to a non-profit voting initiative in 2020 to help people cast ballots during the pandemic. (Republicans have called the program “Zuckerbucks” and have ripped into it on every possible occasion.) Facebook deplatformed him after his coup attempt on January 6, 2021, after he spread misinformation about the election results that year, and that enraged Trump, who vowed to go after “Big Tech” companies in his second term. Trump now has the power to ruin Meta’s business, and Zuckerberg wants to be on his good side after noticing how Elon Musk did the same after his acquisition of Twitter. The “Make America Great Again” crowd values transphobia and homophobia like no other virtue, so the best way to virtue signal1 to the incoming administration is to stand behind the systemic hatred of vulnerable people.

I wouldn’t consider Zuckerberg a right-winger; I just think he’s a nasty, good-for-nothing grifter. He’s an opportunist at heart, as perfectly illustrated by Tim Sweeney, Epic Games’ chief executive, in perhaps the best the-worst-person-you-know-made-a-great-point post I’ve ever encountered:

After years of pretending to be Democrats, Big Tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration. Beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors.

The second Washington flips to Democrats, Zuckerberg will be back on the “Zuckerbucks” train once again, standing up for democracy and human rights in name only. In truth, he only has one initiative: to make the most money possible. The Biden administration has made accomplishing that goal very difficult for poor Zuckerberg, and it hasn’t stood up for American companies after the European Union’s lawfare against Big Tech, so the latest changes to Meta’s content moderation are meant to curry favor with violent criminals in the Trump administration — including Trump, himself, a violent criminal. So, the changes aren’t about adapting to social acceptability; rather, they conform to MAGA’s most consistent viewpoint: that all gay people are subhuman and women are objects.

3/ Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.

Word salad, noun: “a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases.”

4/ Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

During campaigning season, Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s chief executive and head of Threads, said politics would explicitly never be promoted again on Meta’s platforms because it was inherently decisive. Threads was founded with the goal of de-emphasizing so-called “hard news” in text-based social media, much to the chagrin of its users who, for years at this point, have been begging Meta to flip the switch and stop down-ranking links and news. But now that the election is over and the new administration will begin to highlight its propaganda, Zuckerberg has a change of heart.

Again, Zuckerberg is an opportunist: If he can position Facebook — and Threads, but to a lesser extent — as another MAGA-friendly news outlet, along the likes of Truth Social and X, chances are the new administration will start to give Meta free passes along the way. During Trump’s first term, Twitter was the place to know about what was happening in Washington. Trump’s team never gave information to the “mainstream media,” as it’s known in alt-right circles, instead opting for the Twitter firehose of relatively little editorialization. If Trump tweeted something, Trump tweeted it, and that was it; case closed. Zuckerberg wants to capitalize on Trump’s affinity for text-based social media, and the re-introduction of politics (i.e., “civic content”) aims to appeal to this affinity. If he’s good enough, Trump might throw Zuckerberg a bone, choosing to give Meta some of his precious content.

5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

Meta has had fact-checkers in Texas for years, but Texas is as Republican as California is Democratic, so I don’t think the “concern” makes even a modicum of sense. Again, this is a capitulation to Trump’s camp, which perceives “woke California liberals” as out of touch with America and biased. In reality, there’s no proof that they’re any more biased than Republicans from Texas. Additionally, unless Meta is outsourcing content moderation to cattle fields in West Texas, cities in the state are as liberal — or even more liberal, as pointed out by John Gruber at Daring Fireball — as California, so this entire plan is moot. For all we know, it probably doesn’t exist at all.

I say that after reporting from Wired on Thursday claims sources in the company say “the number of employees that will have to relocate is limited.” The report also says that Meta has content moderators outside of Texas and California, too, like Washington and New York, making it clear as day that it’s just more bluff from Zuckerberg to appease the hard-core anti-California MAGA crowd.

6/ Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.

He’s not the president yet, but the last part of the final sentence makes Zuckerberg’s intentions throughout the whole thread strikingly obvious: “with the support of the U.S. government.” This entire thread is a love letter to the president-elect, who, in four days, has the power to bankrupt Meta in a matter of weeks. He controls the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Justice Department — he could just take Meta off the internet and call it a day. He could throw Zuckerberg in prison. There aren’t any checks and balances in Trump’s second term, so to do business in Trump’s America, Zuckerberg needs his blessing.


After his word salad thread on Threads, Zuckerberg did what any smooth-brained MAGA grifter would do: join Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, on his show to discuss the changes. Adorned with a gold necklace and a terrible curly haircut, Zuckerberg bashed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — which Meta would go on to gut entirely — defended his policy that allows Meta users to call women household objects and bully gay people and gay people only, and lamented that his company had too much “feminine energy.” And he bashed Biden administration officials for “cursing” at Meta employees to remove vaccine misinformation, but that’s the usual for Zuckerberg these days. The Rogan interview — much like Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new policy chief, going on Fox and Friends to advertise the new policy — was a premeditated move to promote the idea that hateful speech is now sanctioned on Meta platforms to the people who would be the most intrigued: misogynistic, manosphere-frequenting Generation Z and Millennial men.

The Rogan interview — which I, a Generation Z man, chose not to watch for my own sanity — is a fascinating look at Zuckerberg’s inner psyche. Here is Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge:

On the Rogan show, Zuckerberg went further in describing the fact-checking program he’d implemented: “It’s something out of like 1984.” He says the fact-checkers were “too biased,” though he doesn’t say exactly how…

Well, Zuckerberg’s out of the business of reality now. I am sympathetic to the difficulties social media platforms faced in trying to moderate during covid — where rapidly-changing information about the pandemic was difficult to keep up with and conspiracy theories ran amok. I’m just not convinced it happened the way Zuckerberg describes. Zuckerberg whines about being pushed by the Biden administration to fact-check claims: “These people from the Biden administration would call up our team, and, like, scream at them, and curse,” Zuckerberg says.

Did you record any of these phone calls?” Rogan asks.

“I don’t know,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think we were.”

But the biggest lie of all is a lie of omission: Zuckerberg doesn’t mention the relentless pressure conservatives have placed on the company for years — which has now clearly paid off. Zuckerberg is particularly full of shit here because Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released Zuckerberg’s internal communications which document this!

In his letter to Jordan’s committee, Zuckerberg writes, “Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down.” “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

“Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down.” So, by Zuckerberg’s own admission, it was never the Biden administration that forced Meta to remove content — it was on Zuckerberg’s volition after prompting from the administration. This was backed up by the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, where the justices, back last June, said that the government simply requested offending content to be removed. Murthy v. Missouri was tried in front of the Supreme Court by qualified legal professionals, and Zuckerberg, for a sizable portion of the Rogan interview, lied through his teeth about its decision. This has already been decided by the courts! It is not a point of contention that the Biden administration did not force Meta to remove content; doing so would be a violation of Meta’s First Amendment rights.

Back to Zuckerberg’s psyche: This sly admission, like many others in the interview, is a peek into Zuckerberg’s blether. His nonsense thread is a love letter to the Trump administration written just the way Trump would: with no factual merit, long-winded rants about free speech and over-moderation, and no substantive remedies. I always like to say that if someone tells blatantly obvious lies, it’s safe to assume even the less conspicuous claims are also fibs. That, much like it does to Trump, applies perfectly to Zuckerberg — a crude, narcissistic businessman.

As I wrote earlier, Zuckerberg got his great idea after observing how Musk, the owner of X, got into Trump’s inner circle. Musk and Trump are notoriously not friends; Trump a few years ago posted about how he could have gotten Musk to “drop to your knees and beg.” Nevertheless, Musk is one of Trump’s key lieutenants in the transition, giving Zuckerberg hope that he, too, can get out of the “we’ll-throw-him-in-prison” zone. Tim Cook — Apple’s chief executive who donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and is set to attend the event January 20 — got his way with Trump in a similar fashion, posing with the then-president at a factory in Austin, Texas, where Mac Pro units were being assembled in 2019. (Those old enough to remember “Tim Apple” will recall the business-oriented bromance between Trump and Cook.) Cook is doing it again this year, making it harder for Zuckerberg to fit in amongst his biggest competition. His solution: Get Trump to hate Apple. Here is Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Zuckerberg has long been an outspoken critic of App Store policies and Apple’s privacy protections. In this interview with Rogan, the Meta CEO claimed that the 15-30% fees Apple charges for the App Store are a way for the company to mask slowing iPhone sales. According to Zuckerberg, Apple hasn’t “really invented anything great in a while” and is just “sitting” on the iPhone.

Zuckerberg also took issue with AirPods and the fact that Apple wouldn’t give Meta the same access to the iPhone for its Meta Ray-Ban glasses.

Zuckerberg, however, said he’s “optimistic” that Apple will “get beat by someone” sooner rather than later because “they’ve been off their game in terms of not releasing innovative things.”

Miller’s piece includes a litany of great quotes from the interview, including Zuckerberg’s seemingly never-ending aspersions about Apple Vision Pro and iMessage’s blue bubbles. In response to the article, Zuckerberg posted this gold-mine foaming-at-the-mouth reply on Threads:

The real issue is how they block developers from accessing iPhone functionality they give their own sub-par products. It would be great for people if Ray-Ban Meta glasses could connect to your phone as easily as airpods, but they won’t allow that and it makes the experience worse for everyone. They’ve blocked so many things like this over the years. Eventually it will catch up to them.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Again, never put it past a liar to lie incessantly at every opportunity. As I wrote in my article about Meta’s interoperability requests under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, Apple already has a developer tool for this called AccessorySetupKit, with the only catch being that the tool doesn’t allow developers to snoop on users’ connected Bluetooth devices and Wi-Fi networks, which wouldn’t be so great for Meta’s bottom line. So, for offering a tool that doesn’t allow Meta to abuse its monopoly over smart glasses and social networks to harm consumers, Apple gets hit with the “sub-par products” line. As an example, Apple’s biggest software competitor is Google, which makes Android, and Google never calls Apple products sub-par. As a businessman, calling a competitor’s product “sub-par” is just a sign of weakness.

But this weakness isn’t coincidental. Apple is facing one of the biggest antitrust lawsuits in its history, and Trump — along with Pam Bondi, his nominee for attorney general — has the power to halt it instantly the moment he takes office. If Zuckerberg can get on Trump’s good side and paint Apple as a greedy, anti-American corporation in the next few days before the transition, he hopes it can outweigh Cook’s influence on the house of cards just long enough for the case to go to trial.

And besides, Meta hasn’t invented anything other than Facebook itself two decades ago. Its largest platforms — Instagram, WhatsApp, and Meta Quest — were all acquisitions; its new text-based social media app, Threads, is a blatant one-for-one copy of Twitter’s 16-year-old idea; its large language model trails behind ChatGPT, its content moderation ideas are stolen straight from X’s playbook; and its chat apps use Signal’s encryption protocol. Meta is not an innovator and never has been one — every accusation is a confession. But, again, none of this logic is at the heart of Zuckerberg’s case or is really even relevant to analyze the brazen changes coming to Meta’s platforms.


The Rogan interview — along with the major policy changes on Meta platforms announced just about a week before Trump’s inauguration — was a strategic, calculated public relations maneuver from Zuckerberg and his tight-knit team of close advisers. He and his company have a lot to gain — and lose — from a second Trump administration, and so does his competition. But Zuckerberg, along with the wide range of tech leaders from Shou Chew of TikTok to Jensen Huang of Nvidia, understands that the best way to remain at the top for just long enough is to take down the competition and play a little game of “The Apprentice.”

In the end, all of this will be over in about a year, tops. In the Trump orbit, nothing ever lasts for too long. It really is a delicate house of cards, formed with bonds of bigotry and corporate greed. While Zuckerberg may be on Trump’s good side leading up to the inauguration, he might be bested by Musk’s X or Chew’s TikTok, both of whom are in desperation mode. Only one can win: If TikTok does, Zuckerberg is out of the tournament; if Zuckerberg wins, Musk makes the embarrassing walk back to the failure that plagued the first X.com. And if Zuckerberg wins, this country is in for a hell of a ride. Make America sane again.


  1. Every accusation is a confession. ↩︎