Once upon a time, surf mime and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and then it was OK to use slurs against LGBTQ+ people on Facebook and Instagram again. Hooray for freedom! Zuckerberg wasted no time making major changes to Meta’s platforms in what many see as a way to kiss Trump’s ass. After all, Trump once announced that Zuckerberg should go to prison for moderating election content on Facebook.
As Vanity Fair reports, “In addition to axing his company’s fact-checking program, rolling back content moderation, and elevating Republican executives and board members…Meta will also end its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, launched to address the dearth of women, Black, and Hispanic workers in the tech industry.”
Sadly, Meta is not alone in cutting DEI initiatives. That’s happening all across corporate America since DEI doesn’t fit into the white nationalist Christo-fascist agenda of the incoming administration.
Part of the thinking behind ditching DEI is to make tech manly again, Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan.
“I think it’s one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that masculinity is bad,” Zuckerberg said. “I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
Ah, yes. The infinite benefits of masculine aggression. Especially for women and LGBTQ+ people.
Look, no one is saying masculinity is inherently bad. But there are plenty of people dehumanizing transgender people and saying that women can’t be trusted to make reproductive choices — ideas that are deeply rooted in toxic masculinity and the strict gender roles and acts of dominance required for it to flourish.
Bottom line is that male aggression gets people killed. As the saying goes, men would rather kill each other, kill their wives and girlfriends, and kill unarmed Black people on the subway instead of going to therapy.
Look, Facebook has long been a dumpster fire. Young people don’t really use it anymore. It is the domain of the olds. The place where your aunt goes to spout nonsense about vaccines and your cousin posts AI-generated images of a shirtless Trump with well-oiled six-pack abs riding on the back of a giant bald eagle that, if you look closely, has what looks like one human foot and one webbed duck foot.
Instagram, on the other hand, still has some sheen on it that attracts the youths. And Threads, well, Threads presumably is used by someone.
If you thought Meta’s platforms were already megaphones for harmful bullshit, just you wait. Zuckerberg has, at warp speed, made its platforms into super highways for right-wing hate and misinformation.
According to The New York Times, “Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including permitting ‘allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.’ The company cited political discourse about transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that forbade users to say people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.”
Gross.
Zuckerberg claims that he didn’t make all of these changes to appease Trump. Yeah, sure.
“The good thing about [making these changes] after the election is you get to take this cultural pulse,” he told Rogan. “We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn’t say that were just mainstream discourse.”
YES, EXACTLY. AND THAT’S NOT GOOD.
The post-fact America that we live in is not a healthy place. The culture has dismissed expertise as “elitism” and so now scientific findings have to compete with a guy on the toilet doing “his own research” and posting conspiracy theories online.
You don’t have to look far to see that a world where no one trusts each other and there is no shared reality is one where tragedy thrives. COVID-19 was a chance for us to come together for the sake of the greater good. A tone that should have been set by this country’s leaders.
Instead, we had a president who said that COVID-19 would go away “like a miracle,” tweeted “Liberate Michigan” after mitigation measures were put in place to save lives, and suggested that ingesting disinfectant might cure the virus.
But hey, I’m sure if bird flu becomes a big thing, Trump and his MAGA followers will rise to the occasion. Thank god they have Facebook to spread the word.