Mark Zuckerberg in Golgotha
We all share the blame for the subjugation of Meta’s CEO.
On Wednesday, January 8, 2025, I froze in a four-hour night-time queue outside the United States Capitol to pay my respects at the late President Jimmy Carter’s viewing. I did not know the man. He was never president in my lifetime. But he was decent, and I thought it important to pay respects to a good soul in a time where there seem to be few. (Of those, none are currently Republicans.) I could hardly move my fingers by the time I got inside the People’s House; at the security checkpoint, when asked to remove my belt by a man with a large gun, I quite nearly “dropped trou” fumbling in that sacred space.
Elsewhere, Los Angeles burned. And with it, the nation’s better angels were immolating.
I felt an internal pang worse than the 20-degree wind. This Washington, this America, did not measure to the example of Mr. Carter’s dedication to the service of others. We have already left the Judgement Gate. I regret much of what brought our country towards this agonizing Republican rule, but of all the civic derelictions I would ask Democratic leadership to account for, none disturbs me as much as our party’s failure to protect and cherish The Facebook founder, Meta CEO, and T-Pain collaborator Mark Zuckerberg.
My previous sentence will elicit protestations from the acolytes of Senator Bernie Sanders. They ask: “What obligation could I have to Mr. Zuckerberg?” But as today’s youth say, “Hear me out.”
What “the Zuck” did on Tuesday was abhorrent. He did not build a house alongside Habitat for Humanity, nor did he tend to the needs of the hungry, sick, or poor. He did, however, volunteer—he voluntarily surrendered the entire culture of his The Facebook platform to President Donald Trump, the Mandarin Mussolini, in tribute. This was no small thing, and we should pity him that it came to this—Mr. Zuckerberg is already a victim of the incoming regime, and Democrats who ostensibly have promised to #resist authoritarianism nonetheless made no effort to defend him before he was broken. We owed it to him.
Those of us who wistfully remember Napster, MySpace, and Tom grew old alongside Mark; as the platform aged and matured, so did we. As a country, we saw his metamorphosis—his emergence—from silly boy genius to champion fighter. Even as a young billionaire he still carried himself with diffidence. He was once like us—vulnerable, hostile when rejected, prideful, as depicted in Aaron Sorkin’s decent movie The Social Network. Now, he has become a man with swag.
I believe that, for a long time, Mr. Zuckerberg wanted to do some good. “Move fast and break things” was his motto, and The Facebook did much of that, but he was charitable enough. When his platform was adapted for evil, he would craft policies to respond to those recent problems and proactively deter them moving forward. Slate analyzed a history of his crisis response, and described it as following a typical pattern: “(1) “[a]cknowledg[ing] it,” (2) “[d]iffuse[ing] blame,” (3) “[m]ak[ing] the problem manageable,” (4) “[e]mpowering users,” and (5) “[i]nvok[ing] [his own] personal care” (in other words, letting you know that Mr. Zuckerberg was personally on the case.)
Some notable times The Facebook was used for evil:
Facebook's Cambridge Analytica data scandal, explained
FRONTLINE: The Facebook Dilemma - How Facebook Was “Weaponized” In Ukraine
How Facebook Became a Tool for Genocide
Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen: The 60 Minutes Interview
The programs at Meta that have most often come under fire from Republicans were typically enacted in response to these abuses. The company tried to curb hate speech and misinformation and remove bad actors and their content. In 2020, Mr. Zuckerberg donated $350 million to underfunded election boards across the country, helping to make that the nation’s most secure election. GOP liars, of course, would tell you differently: they view The Facebook’s efforts to avoid becoming complicit in another genocide as censorship, and have very dark suspicions about election workers. I wonder if anybody has ever thought of writing Mr. Zuckerberg so much as a thank-you card for this good work that made him a public enemy for half the country.
I have not been able to acquire a copy of Donald J. Trump’s “Save America” coffee-table book to verify this quote for myself, because that thing is $99, only available in hardcover, not carried by any library nearby, and embarrassing to be seen reading in a Barnes and Nobles, but, according to Politico, the twice-impeached felon wrote under a photo of Mr. Zuckerberg:
“[Mark] would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT…. He told me there was nobody like Trump on The Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me…. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington highlighted another such instance on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social platform (which people are saying is the “perfect avenue for potential corruption”):
I understand the 🍊🤡’s threats closely resemble his namesake duck’s cartoon tantrums, and his conspiracies incomprehensibly implicate anybody he wishes to cause grief, but, we ought to appreciate the gravity of the allegations against our boy Z-Pain: He is being accused of treason (classic Republican projection).
I suspect, when warned one of the two candidates for president of the United States desired his eventual death in chains, Mr. Zuckerberg thought to himself: “That is a fate I would like to avoid!”
I sympathize—I, too, would like to avoid “spend[ing] the rest of [my] life in prison.” I am ashamed that I did not speak up for Mr. Zuckerberg. I never wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper condemning Mr. Trump, and as I recall, nearly nobody else did. Some smirking journalists happily put it in their headlines, but the public generally treated this intimidation as a funny curiosity, a testament to how much of a nut the Mandarin Mussolini was lately.
If you are starting to creep a smile, or imagining some “Zuck the cuck” rhyme, stop! Be serious. Your cheeks should redden and your ears should burn, because as Democrats, we have repeatedly promised to #resist exactly this, to preserve liberal democracy and protect our fellow Americans from blatant totalitarianism.
So then what choice did Mr. Zuckerberg have but to travel to Mar-a-Lago, press his hand against his heart (to the soundtrack of the iTunes-chart-topping January 6 Prison Choir) and profess his fealty and subjugation? President Joe Biden called these moves “really shameful,” and they were, but should Mr. Zuckerberg have consented simply to go to jail, forever, because it was the right thing to do—knowing that he would be sacrificed for an American people who would not lift a finger or spend a dime to protect or even appreciate him?
Make no mistake—Mr. Zuckerberg is buying his favor by making other people suffer. In the last week:
United Fighting Championship president Dana White (videotaped here slapping his wife) was appointed to the Meta Board of Directors (nakedly, a reward for a Trump loyalist.
The Community Standards were altered to explicitly allow for more racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. For some reason it was also made legal again to compare women to household objects. As one employee put it, Meta is “explicitly carving out which groups of marginalized people can have … hate speech directed at them.”
The Facebook’s fact-checking program was ended, to the surprise of the working fact-checkers who have families to feed. They deserved prior warning about their impending unemployment.
Trust and safety teams will be moved from California to Texas, where there’s “less concern about the bias of our team” (supposedly meaning Californians might be more partial to removing hate speech than Texans.) Bluntly: Mr. Zuckerberg is disposing of employees to find favor with racists.
The New York Times reports tampon dispensers were pulled from the men’s rooms in Silicon Valley, Texas, and New York.
The Pride and transgender flag color themes were removed from Messenger, and the initial posts announcing them were deleted (memory-holed).
Meta killed its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives—a questionable choice for a global, multicultural communications and community platform.
Recall that while Mr. Zuckerberg was hyperfocusing on the Serious Business of looking less woke, Los Angeles was on fire. As I write this, the Palisades are still burning.
Thousands of structures have been destroyed. Homes are gone. People are dead. Mr. Zuckerberg could be using his vast resources to help the city. Instead, he chooses to denigrate and disable fact-checking so that Republicans can lie about the fire. In the aftermath of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6, Mr. Zuckerberg said the “ risks of allowing [Donald Trump] to continue to use our service during [the presidential transition] period are simply too great.” Now, he is removing any disincentives to that same man lying. In other words—even knowing that Donald Trump has and will bring harm to real people with his platform.
I do not personally believe that Mr. Zuckerberg is meaningfully red-pilled. I do think that, like many Americans, he does not want to “go to prison for the rest of [his] life.” That he can be bullied makes him human; that he is willing for others to be hurt instead of him is a trait he shares with many others. He would likely have made a different personal transformation had Vice President Kamala Harris been the victor, but we do not live in a good world.
Democrats must dispense with the fantasy that Mr. Trump’s threats are bluster and their targets will not take them seriously. People will not martyr themselves simply to be good. It is cheap, fun, and easy to mock and condemn Mr. Zuckerberg for capitulating—I am partial to drawing a thought bubble over his head where he shouts: “my name is Reek!”—but if we are serious about protecting this country from a dishonest fascist like Donald Trump, then we should regard him as an early victim of the regime. If we want future “Zucks” to be heroes and #resist bravely, we will have support and incentivize them, not mock them (“Here comes the king of the tech bros!”) when they are broken.
It is sad that Mr. Zuckerberg feels he has to remodel himself to avoid persecution. The villain is the persecutor, not the persecuted. The Facebook algorithm has caused much suffering before—again, see the genocide in Myanmar—and it is a profound horror it apparently will be trained to do so again on the LGBTQ community.
I have faced some criticism for this view. Many of my colleagues hold that in serving evil, even under the threat of incarceration, Mr. Zuckerberg has become a villain himself—no, he has always been a villain! This could be true. And if that were so, why did we ask him to voluntarily stay the threats of misinformation, propaganda, and hate speech on his platforms? Why did we often lean on his better angels to repair the dangerous deficiencies of The Facebook, when we could instead use regulations to compel him?
I suppose, Dear Reader, I should reveal the secret meanness at the heart of this analysis. Mr. Zuckerberg is acting with a great bit of bravado, wearing gold chains on Joe Rogan and bragging about how businesses need some “masculine energy” or some bullshit like that. He insists the public view his sudden permissiveness towards transphobia, sexism, and other harms as a reasoned and deliberate choice that he had a great deal of agency in, that he came to of his own volition. This is a lie, the sort a hostage will always tell.
It is now permissible to exploit and lie about the conflagration in Los Angeles on The Facebook. President Carter is dead, and with it should be our expectations of decency. There is much to lament. Mocking Mr. Zuckerberg for being threatened into compliance with an authoritarian regime is cheap entertainment, but by partaking we become complicit with his subjugation and enhance his victimization. If we valued those principles—enough to jeer at him for forsaking them—then we should have demanded they be codified, instead of expecting good-willed, voluntary compliance from a man we had no will to defend from a president who vows to hurt Americans.
I did not return home from President Carter’s viewing until dawn glared without warmth. In the light, it was plain our democracy was growing uglier. Institutions are changing—becoming worse—to fit the era. We should remember Shakespeare’s Laertes: “best safety lies in fear,” and understand rich and poor men alike will hold this as an ethos. The drive to be safe even if subjugated is natural, even if it leads the rest to ruin. We cannot expect most men to walk toward their imprisonment happily, to be hurt for convictions they have the means to shed. We honor President Carter for his decency precisely because it is a rarity—so knowing that, why should we assume lesser men, like Mr. Zuckerberg, will spontaneously develop some heroism?