The Scene
It was going so well for Mark Zuckerberg after years of being slammed by the tech media following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Threads became the favored social media app for Elon haters. His image makeover, including mixed martial arts fights and gold chains, made him a press darling once again.
Now, it looks like Trump has once again caused Zuckerberg’s likeability to plummet. This time, it’s Zuckerberg’s ostensible cozying up to Trump that has everyone up in arms.
Last week, he ended the company’s fact-checking program. And on Thursday, The New York Times reported that Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for Meta’s diversity practices, citing an anonymous source who knew about the meeting.
Throwing Sandberg under the bus allegedly occurred at Mar-a-Lago late last year in a meeting with Stephen Miller, a hardline anti-immigration Trump aide. Tech journalists are not mincing words. Zuckerberg “is a small little creature with a shriveled soul,” wrote Kara Swisher on Threads, in response to the Times article.
Reed’s view
What’s missing from these missives is the real and visceral feeling in the US, and abroad, that the policing of online speech and DEI efforts went overboard.
Zuckerberg is in charge of an online platform that, on a daily basis, serves a user base six times the size of the US population. His most vocal critics, meanwhile, are sequestered in niche social media apps like Bluesky and Threads.
And throughout the various periods of backlash against Meta and its CEO over the years, the number of people on the platform and the advertisers who want to reach them haven’t gone down. Whether that changes this time around remains to be seen. But its scale suggests its platforms, and Zuckerberg, will be fine.