With his toxic overhaul, Emperor Zuckerberg prepares to be Trump’s puppet | John Naughton

Yesthere are ears Economist The magazine had a striking cover in which Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was depicted as a languid clone of the Roman emperor Augustus. This was inspired by stories that Zuck was fascinated by Gus. On his honeymoon in Rome in 2012, for example, he took so many photos of the emperor’s sculptures that his wife joked that it was like there were three people on vacation. The couple even named their second daughter August.

Explaining his fascination with Rome’s first emperor, Zuckerberg told the New Yorkers that “basically, through a very tough approach, he established 200 years of world peace… What are the compromises?” On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that we are talking about today (but) which did not come without cost and he had to do certain things.”

He had actually done it. And guess what? Last November, Zuckerberg – who had kicked Donald Trump out of Facebook and Instagram in the wake of January 6, 2021 – flew to Florida to have dinner with the new emperor of the United States, a man who had declared a few months earlier that his guest would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he tried to interfere in the 2024 US elections.

It seems that the Meta boss left Mar-a-Lago convinced that – like Augustus before him – he had to “do certain things”. He had already started to change his look. Gone are the jeans, gray T-shirts and hoodies and short-cropped hair of yesteryear, replaced by a mop of curly hair, casual T-shirts in new colors, a shearling jacket and a £735,000 watch. Oh – and chains, lots of them.

But it was just a matter of style. After his dinner with Trump, Zuck got down to business, namely some of his company’s practices that Maga’s audience found infuriating. He spent six weeks locked up with his top policy and communications officials to hammer out the sweeping changes that would be necessary to keep Meta out of Trump’s crosshairs. And on January 7, he revealed them in a video.

The company, he explained, would change the way speech was treated in its apps and ease restrictions on how people could talk about hot topics such as immigration, sexuality and gender . He would abandon his fact-checking operations and replace them with the weak “community ratings” approach taken by Elon Musk on X. He would end his much-hated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work by the Maga crowd, would eliminate the role of diversity officer and abandon its diversity recruiting goals.

After that, Zuck spent three hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast in which, among other things, he talked about the need for a more macho vibe in the corporate world. “Masculine energy is a good thing,” he said, “and obviously society has a lot of it, but I think the corporate culture was really trying to move away from that.” I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a little more has its own merits that are really positive.

You understand the drift. The world needs more macho CEOs. More importantly, there’s a new emperor in town and Zuck must stay to his right. But on January 9, the Intercept had a scoop that illustrates how this gap plays out on the ground. This took the form of leaks of internal training materials for content moderators on Meta’s platforms.

The new guidelines give users new freedoms to post a wide range of derogatory remarks about race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity. Here are examples of what is now allowed (at least in the United States): “Immigrants are dirty, dirty shit”; “Gays are monsters”; “Trans people are immoral. » The guidelines are riddled with contradictions. “Migrants are no better than throwing up” is allowed, but “Muslims make me want to throw up” should be removed because it claims one group “causes disease.” “You can’t trust these damn immigrants, they’re all criminals” is acceptable, but “black people are all drug dealers” remains a no-no. And so on.

In a way, these revelations simply confirm that effective “moderation” of content on social media is a Sisyphean task – at least on platforms whose business models prioritize engagement (and therefore extremism) rather than decorum. But on a deeper level, the story of Zuckerberg’s gap usefully illustrates what the future holds for the tech industry: When Donald Trump says “jump,” Silicon Valley’s only question will be: “How much?” height ?

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