As the US inauguration approaches, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has positioned his company for the second Trump era.
Four years ago, after the January 6 riots, Meta deplatformed Donald Trump. Now it’s donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and Zuckerberg says the tech sector needs more “male energy” and a revival of a corporate culture “that celebrates aggression.”
He made the comments on it The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast amid massive structural and cultural changes at Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, including eliminating third-party fact-checking and changing policies to allow slurs against some vulnerable groups.
Media experts suggest his moves shed light on how the winds of political change could lead to more discord on social media and limit diversity in the already largely homogeneous tech sector.
Celebrate aggression
One of the main talking points of Zuckerberg’s conversation was the idea that corporate workplaces have distanced themselves from a certain type of masculinity.
“Male energy is good, and of course society has plenty of it, but I think corporate culture has really tried to move away from it,” Zuckerberg said during his nearly three-hour conversation with Rogan.
“I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a little bit more has its own benefits that are really positive,” he added.
This language matters, according to Robert Lawson, an associate professor of sociolinguistics at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom who studies the intersection between language and masculinity both online and offline.
He said it was surprising that Zuckerberg was calling for more masculinity, since technology in particular is already a male-dominated field.
As of June 2022, only 37.1 percent of Meta Platforms’ total global employees were women. According to Statista, only 25.8 percent of technical positions and 36.7 percent of management positions were women.
Lawson called this type of rhetoric a “vulnerable sense of entitlement” from men who have long been at the center of society and who may no longer feel that way as diversity and inclusion efforts increase.
“And they’re mad,” he added.
Lawson said the sentiment is becoming more mainstream in the US because of the “type of male identity” that Trump represents.
But what does this kind of rhetoric mean for the future of Meta – both its workplace and its flagship products Facebook and Instagram?
Changes could lead to a “slow erosion” of minority groups
Since the US election, Zuckerberg has tried to better adapt to Trump’s new administration through various structural and cultural changes.
The move comes as Meta prepares to face trial in April over allegations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that the social media platform bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush emerging competition.
The interview with Joe Rogan was published just days after Meta announced major changes to its content moderation policies, which have since been praised by 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 inauguration fund. Technology analyst Carmi Levy says it’s an attempt to curry favor with Trump, who is known as a “transactional leader.”
The new guidelines, which continue to prohibit insults about a person’s intelligence or mental illness, now make an exception and allow users to make posts accusing 2SLGBTQ+ people of being mentally ill because they are gay or transgender.
The company defends them on the grounds that they prioritize free speech, but even free speech advocates have questioned the creation of explicit exceptions for vulnerable groups.
Meta did not respond to a CBC News request for comment on the changes.
End diversity efforts, reduce costs
The company also announced it would be halting many of its diversity and inclusion efforts, prompting backlash from some. Internally, almost 400 employees reacted to the announcement with a crying emoji; According to a report from Business Insider, some called it “disappointing.”
The New York Times reported that employees were ordered to remove tampons from men’s restrooms that had been provided to the company’s nonbinary and transgender employees.
Lawson expects these changes to result in a “slow decline” in the number of women and various minority groups both working on and engaging with Meta’s platforms.
He said this was all due to “young men’s concerns about decentralization” and was an attempt to take back control of spaces.
“I think it will drive away the very communities that will be in the crosshairs of the alt-right, the more toxic, problematic people.”
The company is also stopping third-party fact-checking in the U.S., a move that dozens of fact-checking organizations have criticized.
“If you let the most harmful users thrive on your platform, the people who are not harmful will leave,” said Elizabeth Lopatto, a senior writer at The Verge who covers finance and technology.
She believes these changes at Meta are both “ideologically motivated” and attempts to “cut costs.” Meta reportedly plans to cut five percent of its global workforce this year.
“Maybe you want to get rid of a certain portion of your employees and you can get them to quit by saying, ‘Hey, this is going to be terrible for you,'” Lopatto said.
What happens now?
There are also personnel changes in the company.
In addition to the massive donation to the president-elect’s inauguration, Zuckerberg appointed Dana White, UFC CEO and longtime Trump ally, to Meta’s board and replaced the company’s political director, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, a former Republican lobbyist with strong ties to the party.
“Given all the trips Mark Zuckerberg has made to Mar-a-Lago, it’s pretty obvious that he has a wish list … so I think there’s some level of horse-trading going on here,” Lopatto said.
Lopatto said this idea of traditional masculinity in tech fields is not new.
Zuckerberg famously began his career by developing FaceMash (which would eventually lead to the founding of Facebook), a website designed to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard University.
In a 2014 article, former Facebook employee and Mark Zuckerberg ghostwriter Katherine Losse wrote about how FaceMash’s gender dynamics continued with the founding of Facebook, citing a Harvard study that found that Women and men made up the majority of viewed profiles on the site and made up the majority of profile viewers and website creators.
“It (Facebook) wasn’t a very welcoming place for women. And if you look at the diversity statistics, it still probably isn’t,” Lopatto said.
As for the future, Lopatto points to events at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in 2020 as a possible outcome. That year, dozens of employees left the company after its CEO promised that the company would not engage in social activities.
