As inauguration draws nearer in the U.S., Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been positioning his company for the second Trump era.
Four years ago, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots, Meta booted Donald Trump off its platform. Now, it’s donating $1 million US to Trump’s inauguration, and Zuckerberg says the tech sector needs more “masculine energy” alongside a revival of a corporate culture “that celebrates the aggression.”
He made the comments on the The Joe Rogan Experience podcast amid massive structural and cultural changes at Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, including the removal of third-party fact-checking and changing guidelines to allow slurs against some vulnerable groups.
His moves lend insight, media experts suggest, as to how the winds of political change could lead to more discord on social media — and limit diversity in the already largely homogenous tech sector.
Celebrating aggression
One of the main talking points of Zuckerberg’s conversation was an idea that corporate workplaces have distanced themselves from a particular type of masculinity.
“Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said during his nearly three-hour long conversation with Rogan.
“I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive,” he added.
That language is significant, according to Robert Lawson, an associate professor in sociolinguistics at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom who studies the intersection between language and masculinity in both online and offline settings.
He said it was surprising that Zuckerberg called for more masculinity, given that the tech in particular is already a male-dominated field.
As of June 2022, only 37.1 per cent of all global Meta Platforms employees were women. Women made up just 25.8 percent of tech roles and 36.7 percent of leadership roles, according to data from Statista.
Lawson called this kind of rhetoric “aggrieved entitlement” from men who, for a long time have been the centre of society, and with the rise of diversity and inclusion efforts, may no longer feel like that.
“And they’re pissed off,” he added.
Lawson said the sentiment is becoming more mainstream in the U.S. because of the “sort of masculine identity” Trump represents.
But what does this type of rhetoric mean for Meta’s future — both its workplace and its flagship products Facebook and Instagram?
Changes could lead to ‘slow erosion’ of minority groups
Since the U.S. election, Zuckerberg has sought to better align himself with Trump’s incoming administration through various structural and cultural changes.
The shift comes as Meta prepares to face trial in April over the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s allegations that the social media platform bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush emerging competition.
The Joe Rogan interview was released just days after Meta announced major changes to its content moderation policies that have since received 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 inauguration fund. Technology analyst Carmi Levy says it’s an attempt to ‘curry favour’ with Trump, who is known as a ‘transactional’ leader.
The new guidelines, which will continue to prohibit insults about someone’s intellect 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 as prioritizing freedom of expression, but even free speech advocates have questioned creating explicit exceptions that target vulnerable groups.
Meta didn’t respond to a CBC News request for comment regarding the changes.
Ending diversity efforts, cutting costs
The company also said it will halt many of its diversity and inclusion efforts, which sparked backlash among some. Internally, nearly 400 employees reacted with a crying emoji to the announcement; with some calling it “disappointing,” according to a report from Business Insider.
The New York Times reported that employees were instructed to remove tampons from men’s restrooms, which had been made available for the company’s nonbinary and transgender employees.
Lawson thinks these changes will lead to a “slow erosion” of women and various minority groups both working at, and engaging with, Meta’s platforms.
He said this is all comes down to a “concern among young men of being decentralized” and is an attempt to regain control of spaces.
“I think it will drive out exactly those communities that will be in the crosshairs from the alt-right, from the more toxic, problematic people.”
The company is also ending third-party fact-checking in the U.S., a move that dozens of fact-checking organizations have criticized.
“If you let the most noxious users flourish on your platform, the people who aren’t noxious will leave,” said Elizabeth Lopatto, a senior writer at The Verge who reports on finance and technology.
She believes that these changes at Meta are both “ideologically motivated” and attempts to “cut costs,” with Meta reportedly planning to cut five per cent of its global workforce this year.
“You might want to get rid of a specific part of your employees and you can induce them to quit by being like, hey, it’s going to be miserable for you now,” said Lopatto.
What happens now?
The company is also undergoing personnel changes.
In addition to the massive donation to the president-elect’s inauguration, Zuckerberg has put Dana White, UFC CEO and longtime Trump ally, on Meta’s board and replacing the company’s head of policy, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, a former Republican lobbyist with strong ties to the party.
“It’s pretty obvious given all of the trips that Mark Zuckerberg has made to Mar-a-Lago, that he’s got a wish list … so I think that there’s a certain amount of horse trading going on here,” said Lopatto.
Lopatto said this idea of traditional masculinity in tech spaces isn’t new.
Zuckerberg famously launched his career by creating FaceMash (what would eventually lead to the creation of Facebook), a website that was used to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard University.
In a 2014 article, former Facebook employee and Mark Zuckerberg ghost writer Katherine Losse wrote about how the gendered dynamics of FaceMash continued with the creation of Facebook, referencing a Harvard study that found women made up the majority of viewed profiles on the site, and men made up the majority of profile viewers and site creators.
“It [Facebook] was not a very welcoming place for women. And looking at the diversity statistics, arguably it still isn’t,” Lopatto said.
As for the future, Lopatto points to what happened at cryptocurrency exchange site Coinbase in 2020, as a potential outcome. That year, dozens of employees left after their CEO pledged the company would not participate in social activism.
