Zuckerberg’s talk is macho, but his actions scream cowardice

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I really, really wanted to like Mark Zuckerberg’s gushing appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast Friday. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, made some important points about the inadequacies of fact-checking as well as the troubling ways that governments can manipulate private companies.

Having grown up under an authoritarian regime, I cherish the right to free speech that Zuckerberg kept talking about. But having gone on to study the way that authoritarian regimes work, I know to focus on what people do, not what they say.

On the podcast, Zuckerberg told Rogan about how society had become too “neutered or emasculated” and gushed about “masculine energy” and his newfound devotion to jujitsu.

I’m not their target audience but I feel their vibe. ACL tears, which they spent some time commiserating about, are pretty nasty. And I have a soft spot for martial arts content.

But one of the most recent actions that Zuckerberg’s supposedly emboldened company took was to banish tampons from office men’s rooms. (The products had been provided for transgender or nonbinary employees.) “Masculine energy,” my lady-parts — that is the most snowflake move I’ve heard of in a long time. If the men in your company can’t even handle the sight of a box of tampons, you’ve got bigger problems than an ACL tear.

It wasn’t the only bizarre contradiction of the week.

Zuckerberg says that in the name of free speech, the company he founded “to give people a voice” will no longer attempt to moderate hate speech and misinformation. Facebook will now allow users to allege, among other things, “mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” And the rule that prohibited users from claiming that people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus? It’s gone. Slander whoever you like. Knock yourself out.

Hate speech in the 21st century is a complicated issue. We can’t just moderate our way out of our very real conflicts over immigration, transgender rights, pandemic response and other issues. Zuckerberg conveniently neglected to mention that Facebook profits off tribalizing, inflammatory, conspiratorial content, which has been shown to keep people scrolling. He is right, however, that fact-checking could never catch more than a tiny portion of those posts. (Though how is that a defense, by the way?) He’s also right that fact-checkers lost a good deal of public trust by overstepping their boundaries. Even if those mistakes were rare, fact-checking is a trust-based mechanism, and that was enough to break it.

So for better or worse, on a range of charged topics, people can now more or less say whatever they want on the platform.

Oh, wait:

This week Meta announced a change to Facebook’s Messenger App. Users who want to customize their wallpaper can still do so, but they will no longer have the option to use themes with colors of the transgender and nonbinary flag.

Whatever one’s position on transgender rights, limiting people’s ability to express themselves — in private conversations with their friends — is not a great way to kick off a free-speech crusade.

It’s a long way from where Zuckerberg was during the Biden or the Obama administration. In those very different political climates, he apologized for Facebook’s role in promoting fake news and hate speech and vowed to take action. The platform even kicked Donald Trump off on Jan. 7, 2021.

But Trump (and his buddy Elon Musk) doesn’t like restrictions on hate speech, and now neither does Zuckerberg. Transgender rights are a flashpoint for Trump’s base, so tampons and theme colors have got to go. Flattery and obeisance are how powerful people keep themselves in favor with strongman regimes. Cash works, too.

Look at the Saudis. When Trump came into the office the first time, they had a problem: He had accused them of having links to the Sept. 11 attacks and of wanting “women as slaves and to kill gays.” So in advance of his visit in 2017, the Saudi capital, Riyadh, was dotted with billboards showing his face and his tweets. The Saudis have spent lavish sums at his properties and funded tournaments at his golf courses. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s wealth fund invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s investment fund, even though it reportedly had yet to turn a profit. And just last year, a new Trump Tower in the Saudi city of Jeddah was announced.

Silicon Valley was slow to learn the lesson — too many years under an imperfect but functioning democracy, I guess — but they’re catching up fast. Today, tech moguls are rushing to donate millions to Trump’s second inauguration. They’re clamoring to dine at Mar-a-Lago. Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for exclusive rights to a new documentary about Melania Trump.

It’s mortifying, or should be.

If, however, Zuckerberg is telling us the truth that the Biden administration pressured Facebook employees during the COVID pandemic, trying to get them to take down vaccine-related content — even when it was true and discussed actual side effects, or was humorous or satire — then I share his sense of outrage. During the pandemic, the authorities weren’t always sufficiently transparent about the uncertainties or trade-offs of public health policy. And while anti-vaccine forces did weaponize information in bad faith, the solution was for officials to level with the public, not to strong-arm the platforms.

Since Zuckerberg and Rogan were talking about the illegitimate use of government power to pressure companies, I eagerly waited for them to talk about how Trump had, just last September, threatened to throw Zuckerberg in jail for life because of some nonpartisan donations he and his wife made to strengthen the election infrastructure when it was creaking under the weight of the pandemic. Trump claimed those donations were a plot against his candidacy.

I mean, a strongman presidential candidate threatening a powerful CEO for exercising his rights as a citizen — that’s bad, right? That’s anti-free speech? That’s lawfare?

But nah. Neither Zuckerberg nor Rogan mentioned it. They just praised Trump.

Facebook is in a strange spot. Many Democrats don’t like the company because they think it’s gotten too powerful. Lina Khan, the current chair of the Federal Trade Commission, brought an antitrust suit against it. But many Republicans don’t like it either. Vice President-elect JD Vance is a fan of Khan. Several red states, including Texas and Florida, have repeatedly sued or passed laws targeting the company. Many in Trump’s base see Zuckerberg as just another unprincipled, Harvard-trained member of the elite.

Zuckerberg told Rogan that “one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump is I think he just wants America to win.” And then he got to the heart of the matter: He suggested that Trump use the power of the U.S. government to defend Meta abroad — for instance, from the huge fines that the European Union has imposed on it for violating data privacy and antitrust rules.

When discussing his love for jujitsu, Zuckerberg told Rogan that the sport let him “just express myself, right?”

“It’s like when you’re running a company, people typically don’t want to see you being this ruthless person who’s just, like, ‘I’m just going to crush the people I’m competing with,’” he said. But in martial arts, “you’re rewarded” for being ruthless.

What is the reward for boasting about your own toughness while charting your umpteenth cowardly zigzag in order to please the people in power? I guess we’re about to find out.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.