I’ll spare you the experience of listening to 1 of the richest men in the planet whine and just tell you consecutive out: Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience is full of lies.
Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, sets the speech at the very beginning: “I think at any level you only start 1 of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice, right?”
Unfortunately I wasn’t born yesterday, and I remember Zuckerberg’s first effort at getting rich: FaceMash, a clone of HotOrNot where he uploaded photos of his fellow female students to be rated — without their consent. “Giving people a voice” is 1 way of describing that, I suppose. Personally, I’d call it “creep shit.”
If you can get distant with the tiny bullshit, you can get distant with the large bullshit, right?
Early on in the interview, Zuckerberg tests out the water to see how much pushback he’ll get; Rogan is simply a notoriously soft interviewer — it’s like listening to your dumbest stoned friend hold a conversation — but he does occasionally challenge his guests. So Zuckerberg says that there are limits on the First Amendment by saying, “It’s like, all right, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.”
“Fire in a crowded theater” makes every lawyer I know foam at the mouth because it’s flat out wrong. It is not the law, and it never has been. And, obviously, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theatre — especially if, you know, the theatre is on fire. Rogan says nothing in consequence to this, and Zuckerberg knows he’s got a willing mark. If you can get distant with the tiny bullshit, you can get distant with the large bullshit, right?
For his part, Rogan serves up Zuckerberg a series of softballs, setting his own speech by referring to content moderation as “censorship.” The thought that the government was forcing Zuckerberg to “censor” news about covid and covid vaccines, huntsman Biden’s laptop, and the election is something of a moving subject throughout the interview. erstwhile Zuckerberg isn’t outright lying about any of this, he’s rather vague — but in case you were wondering, a man who was formally rebuked by the city of San Francisco for putting his name on a infirmary while his platforms spread wellness misinformation thinks that “on balance, the vaccines are more affirmative than negative.” Whew!
Misinformation on Facebook started well before the 2016 election — as early as 2014, scammers were spreading Ebola lies on Facebook. Shortly after the 2016 election, Adam Mosseri — then Facebook’s VP of product management — said in a statement that Facebook was combating fake news but “there’s so much more we request to do.” Facebook did receive criticism for spreading fake news, including misinformation that benefitted president Donald Trump, but even then, Zuckerberg wasn’t having it. “I do think there is simply a certain profound deficiency of empathy in asserting that the only reason individual could have voted the way they did is they saw any fake news,” Zuckerberg said.
“It’s something out of like 1984.”
Still, in the 2020 election, Facebook — along with another social media networks — took a harsher stance on fake news, making it harder for Macedonian teenagers to make a profit off Trump supporters. During his Rogan interview, Zuckerberg now characterizes this intervention as giving “too much deference to quite a few folks in the media who were fundamentally saying, okay, there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected but for misinformation.”
Facebook implemented a fact-checking program, 1 that active partners specified as the conservative online magazine The Dispatch, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and USA Today. In a concession to Donald Trump’s second presidency, implemented before Trump even took the oath of office, Zuckerberg has said Facebook will end the program. “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in the video announcing the move.
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 precisely how.
The problem wasn’t that the fact-checking was bad; it was that conservatives are more likely to share misinformation and get fact-checked, as any investigation has shown. That means conservatives are besides more likely to be moderated. In this sense, possibly it wasn’t Facebook’s fact-checking systems that had a liberal bias, but reality.
The biggest lie of all is simply a lie of omission
Well, Zuckerberg’s out of the business of reality now. I am sympathetic to the difficulties social media platforms faced in trying to average during covid — where rapidly-changing information about the pandemic was hard 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 evidence any of these telephone calls?” Rogan asks.
“I don’t know,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think we were.”
Many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administration
Rogan then asks who, specifically, was pressuring Facebook. And Zuckerberg has no answer: “It was people in the Biden administration,” he says. “I think it was, you know, I wasn’t active in those conversations directly, but I think it was.”
But the biggest lie of all is simply a lie of omission: Zuckerberg doesn’t mention the relentless force conservatives have placed on the company for years — which has now clearly paid off. Zuckerberg is peculiarly full of crap here due to the fact that Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released Zuckerberg’s interior communications which paper this!
In his letter to Jordan’s committee, Zuckerberg writes, “Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down.” Emphasis mine. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel powerfully that we should not compromise our content standards due to force from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Those emails besides uncover Zuckerberg wanted to blame the Biden White home for how Facebook chose to average the “lab leak” conspiracy explanation of covid origins. “Can we include that the WH put force on us to censor the laboratory leak theory?” he asked in a WhatsApp chat. His erstwhile president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, responded, “I don’t think they put circumstantial force on that theory.”
Joel Kaplan, the erstwhile George W. Bush advisor who has now replaced Clegg, said that blaming the White home for Facebook’s behaviour would “supercharge” conservatives who believed the social media giant was “collaborating” with the Biden administration. “If they’re more curious in criticizing us than actually solving the problems, then I’m not certain how it’s helping the origin to engage with them further,” Zuckerberg wrote. This doesn’t seem to show that the Biden administration successfully censored anything.
Facebook was widely and evidently targeted by Republican lawmakers
In fact, many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administration. Take, for instance, the “Plandemic” video hoax: Facebook removed the video in 2020. Joe Biden took office in 2021. If Zuckerberg was dealing with an administration pressuring him about this, it was the Trump administration. The Biden White home may well have engaged in akin outreach, but it was joining what was already an active discussion about Facebook moderation.
Facebook was widely and evidently targeted by Republican lawmakers, including Jordan, Senator Ted Cruz, Florida politician Ron DeSantis, Texas politician Greg Abbott, Senator Marsha Blackburn, and incoming Vice president JD Vance. It was mostly conservatives who threatened him during the interminable and pointless Congressional hearings Zuckerberg sat through for years – frequently asking him to comment straight on conspiracy theories or request that individual trolls be reinstated to his platforms.
But Zuckerberg didn’t mention any of that to Rogan. Instead, he was upset that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started investigating him for improperly utilizing financial information to mark ads. What does Zuckerberg say about this? Well, let me give it to you straight:
They kind of found any explanation they wanted to investigate. And it’s like, okay, clearly they were trying truly hard, right? To like, to like, find, find any theory, but it, like, I don’t know. It just, it kind of, like, throughout the, the, the, the, the organization and the government, there was just kind of, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know how this stuff works. I mean, I’ve never been in government. I don’t know if it’s like a directive or it’s just like a quiet consensus that like, we don’t like these guys. They’re not doing what we want. We’re going to punish them. But, but it’s, it’s, it’s tough to be at the another end of that.
This is simply a compelling demonstration that jujitsu and MMA training (or hunting pigs in Hawaii or making your neck real thick or whatever) isn’t going to aid you act aggressive if you’re constitutionally bitchmade. Blaming the CFPB for a witch-hunt erstwhile we’ve all watched Republicans mark Facebook truly is something! That’s what this full performance is about: getting Trump, Vance, Jordan and the remainder of the Republican organization to lay off. After all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal cost Facebook just $5 billion — chump change, really. If Zuckerberg plays ball, his next privacy whoopsie could be even cheaper.
In fact, Zuckerberg even offers Republicans another target: Apple. According to Zuckerberg, the way Apple makes money is “by basically, like, squeezing people.” Among his complaints:
- Apple’s 30 percent commission on App store sales
- Airpods work better with Apple phones than all another headphones
- Apple wouldn’t let Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Bans connect to iOS utilizing the same quick-setup protocol Airpods use
- iMessage is simply a walled garden, and groupchats go wonky if there’s a individual with an Android telephone in there
- “I mean at any point I did this like back of the envelope calculation of like all the random rules that Apple puts out. If you know, if they didn’t apply, like I think you know, it’s like — and this is just Meta, I think we’d like, make twice as much profit or something.”
At least any of these Apple issues actually substance — there is simply a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the crucial one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in paper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is mostly no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.
Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all
But Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all. Getting Rogan’s listeners riled up about Zuckerberg’s enemies and uncovering Republicans a fresh tech company mark is just a coincidence, as are the changes to let more hatred speech on his platforms happening now, changes that just happen to pacify Republicans. All of this has nothing to do with the incoming administration, Zuckerberg tells Rogan. “I think quite a few people look at this as like a purely political thing, due to the fact that they kind of look at the timing and they’re like, hey, well, you’re doing this right after the election.” he says. “We effort to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse.”
And did this work? Did Zuckerberg’s gambit to talk about how social media needed more “masculine energy” win over the bros? Well, Barstool’s Dave Portnoy isn’t fooled by this shit.
I don’t know. I did think it was beautiful comic that after all these complaints about government “censorship,” Zuckerberg didn’t say a word about Trump and the Republicans’ efforts at it. After all, Trump, the incoming president who has on occasion threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison, was late asked if the Facebook changes were in consequence to his threats.
