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As the US inauguration approaches, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has positioned his company for a second Trump era.
Four years ago, after the Jan. 6 riots, Meta kicked Donald Trump off its platform. Now that’s donating A million US dollars for Trump’s inaugurationand Zuckerberg says the tech sector needs more “masculine energy” while reviving a corporate culture “that celebrates aggression.”
He made comments on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast amid massive structural and cultural changes at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, including the removal of third-party fact-checking and changing the guidelines to allow offending against some vulnerable groups.
Media experts suggest his moves provide a glimpse into how the winds of political change could lead to more dissent on social media — and limit diversity in an already largely homogenous tech sector.
Celebrating aggression
One of the main themes of Zuckerberg’s talk was the idea that corporate workplaces have distanced themselves from a certain kind of masculinity.
“Male energy is good and obviously society has it in abundance, but I think corporate culture has actually tried to move away from that,” Zuckerberg said during his an almost three-hour conversation with Rogan.
“I think that a culture that celebrates aggression a little more has its advantages that are really positive,” he added.
That language is significant, according to Robert Lawson, an associate professor of sociolinguistics at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom who studies the intersection of language and masculinity in online and offline environments.
He said it was surprising that Zuckerberg was calling for more masculinity, given that technology is a particularly male-dominated field.
As of June 2022, only 37.1 percent of all Meta Platforms global employees were women. Women made up only 25.8 percent of technology roles and 36.7 percent of leadership roles, according to to data from Statista.
Lawson called this kind of rhetoric “disenfranchised” from men who have long been at the center of society, and with increased diversity and inclusion efforts, may no longer feel that way.
“And they are angry,” he added.
Lawson said that sentiment is becoming more popular in the US because of the “kind of masculine identity” that Trump represents.
But what does this kind of rhetoric mean for Meta’s future — both its workplace and its flagship products Facebook and Instagram?
The changes could lead to the ‘slow erosion’ of minority groups
Since the US election, Zuckerberg has sought to better align with Trump’s incoming administration through various structural and cultural changes.
The shift comes as Meta prepares face trial in April over allegations by the US Federal Trade Commission that the social media platform bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush emerging competition.
The interview with Joe Rogan was released just days after Meta announced major changes to its content moderation policies that have since won praise from Trump, who said the company has “come a long way.”
Some big tech CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, are pledging big donations to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund. Technology analyst Carmi Levy says it’s an attempt to “coddle” Trump, who is known as a “transactional” leader.
The new guidelineswhich will continue to prohibit insulting someone’s intellect or mental illness, will now make an exception and allow users to post posts that accuse 2SLGBTQ+ people of being mentally ill because they are gay or transgender.
The company defends them as prioritizing freedom of expression, but even free speech advocates have questioned the creation of express exceptions aimed at vulnerable groups.
Meta did not respond to CBC News’ request for comment regarding the changes.
Ending diversity efforts, cutting costs
The company also said it would halt many of its diversity and inclusion efforts, prompting a backlash from some. Internally, nearly 400 employees reacted with a crying emoji to the post; according to some who call it “disappointing”. a Business Insider report.
The New York Times reported that employees were instructed to remove tampons from the men’s restrooms, which were available to the company’s non-binary and transgender employees.
Lawson believes these changes will lead to a “slow erosion” of women and various minority groups working on and engaging with Meta’s platforms.
He said it all boils down to “young people’s concern about decentralization” and that it is an attempt to regain control of the space.
“I think it’s going to take out the very communities that are going to be targeted by the alt-right, by the more toxic, more problematic people.”
The company is also ending third-party fact-checking in the US, a move that dozens of fact-checking organizations were criticized.
“If you allow the most harmful users to thrive on your platform, the people who are not harmful will leave,” said Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge’s senior writer who reports on finance and technology.
She believes these changes at Meta are both “ideologically motivated” and “cost-cutting” attempts, with Meta reportedly planning to cut five percent of its global workforce this year.
“You might want to get rid of a certain portion of your employees, and you can get them to quit by saying, hey, now you’re going to be miserable,” Lopatto said.
What is happening now?
There are personnel changes in the company.
In addition to a massive donation to the president-elect’s inauguration, Zuckerberg appointed Dana White, the UFC executive and longtime Trump ally, to Meta’s board of directors and replaced the company’s policy chief, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, a former Republican lobbyist with strong ties to the party.
“It’s pretty obvious with all the trips Mark Zuckerberg has made to Mar-a-Lago, that he has a wish list … so I think there’s a certain amount of horse-trading going on here,” Lopatto said.
Lopatto said the idea of traditional masculinity in tech spaces is not new.
Zuckerberg famously began his career by creating FaceMash (which would eventually lead to the creation of Facebook), a website used to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard University.
In an article from 2014Former Facebook employee and Mark Zuckerberg ghostwriter Katherine Losse wrote about how the gender dynamics of FaceMash continued with the creation of Facebook, citing a Harvard study which found that women made up the majority of profiles viewed on the site and men made up the majority of profile viewers and page creators.
“It (Facebook) was not a welcoming place for women. And looking at the diversity statistics, it probably still isn’t,” Lopatto said.
As for the future, Lopatto points to what happened at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in 2020 as a possible outcome. That year, dozens of employees left after their CEO promised that the company would not participate in social activism.
