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The outgoing POTUS took to the bully pulpit Friday while the CEO of META went on Joe Rogan today with very different takes on facts and the truth.
“Telling the truth matters,” declared Joe Biden today in a very critical presidential response to Mark Zuckerberg’s META pulling the plug on fact checking in what is widely seen as more sucking up to Donald Trump.
In what may be his last press conference, the outgoing POTUS spoke about a wide range of topics Friday after giving brief remarks on his economic legacy. With a rare back and forth with the White House press corp., Biden touched on if he could have beaten his now predecessor and successor in last year’s election, if VP Kamala Harris should run again in 2028 (“That would be a decision for her to make.”), the war in Ukraine, pardons and domestic terrorism.
However, it was the January 7 Fox News revealed decision by Zuck to abandoned fact checking on Facebook and Instagram that really seemed to get under the 82-year-old politician’s skin.
“The whole idea of walking away from facts checking, as well as not reporting anything having to do with discrimination …I find to be just contrary to American justice …the way we talk about one another,” Biden said of META’s latest Trump leaning move.
“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about.”
“We want to tell the truth, we haven’t always done it in our nation,” the president added. “We want to tell the truth. And the idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, by the way, from this point on, we’re not going to fact check anything …when you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff,” Biden added.
“I think it’s really shameful.”
Facing a Trump 1.0 initiated antitrust trial this spring over Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp have created a social media monopoly, Zuckerberg has been twisting himself up like a pretzel to please Trump. Pilgrimages to Mar-A-Lago, promoting a former GOP operative to be his top communications guy, and $1 million donation to the inauguration fund have been just a few on the tactics employed by the billionaire to get in the former Celebrity Apprentice’s good graces.
Mirroring in many ways the position of First Buddy and X owner Elon Musk, Zuckerberg was at least upfront about his ditching of fact checking. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” a very surf bro looking Zuckerberg said in a video posted earlier week. “So, we’re going back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Now, he also did say that “legitimately bad stuff” like drugs, terrorism and child exploitation would still be moderated on META”s social media platforms but acknowledged the filters likely won’t stop everything on such issues. The “reality is that this is a trade off,” Zuck added. “It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
To counter, in pure red meat for an audience of one, Zuckerberg offered up that the purpose of ending most fact checking on META was to “simplify our content policy and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Just a few years ago, the Facebook parent company brought in stricter fact checking protocols after widespread reports of the platform being a source of vast disinformation during the 2016 election. Not exactly, bosom buddies with Trump during his first term, Zuck banned the 45th POTUS from Facebook for two years the day after the MAGA attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That suspension was lifted on January 25, 2023, but relations between Trump and Zuckerberg didn’t really improve much.
Coasting his way to renomination and eventually reelection, Trump in late 2023 promised to send Zuckerberg to prison for life for allegedly turning his social media platforms against him in the 2020 election.
That’s all behind the boys now.
In fact, just hours before the retiring Biden made his remarks Friday, Zuckerberg let Joe Rogan know in a sit-down interview in Austin, TX where he was really coming from.
“You want women to be able to succeed and … have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what their background or gender,” the CEO of the company that used to have Sheryl Sandberg as its COO told Trump’s favorite podcaster. “But I think these things can all always go a little far.”
To that, chillingly like much of corporate America in the new Trump era, META today said they would be ending DEI programs. Programs that Zuckerberg himself used to praise as vital to META’s growth and success.
Detailing his self-described “journey” to Zuckerberg unironically told Rogan: “I kind of think in 2016 and the aftermath I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying ‘Okay, there was no way (Trump) could’ve gotten elected except for misinformation. People can’t actually believe this stuff.”
Going full bro and taking a swipe or two at alleged censorship efforts by the Biden team (that actually made his own team look worse), Zuckerberg to Rogan that he believed previously “culturally neutered” tech giants need to get more Y chromosome. “Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” he said – as you can see here:
Joe Biden may try to get in the last word in the last days of his administration in the farewell address that the White House says the President plans to give on January 15.
