Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, sets the tone at the very beginning: “I think at some level you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice, right?”
Unfortunately I wasn’t born yesterday, and I remember Zuckerberg’s first attempt at getting rich: FaceMash, a clone of HotOrNot where he uploaded photos of his fellow female students to be rated — without their consent. “Giving people a voice” is one way of describing that, I suppose. Personally, I’d call it “creep shit.”
Early on in the interview, Zuckerberg tests out the water to see how much pushback he’ll get; Rogan is a notoriously soft interviewer — it’s like listening to your dumbest stoned friend hold a conversation — but he does occasionally challenge his guests. So Zuckerberg says that there are limits on the First Amendment by saying, “It’s like, all right, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.”
“Fire in a crowded theater” makes every lawyerI knowfoam at the mouthbecauseit’sflat out wrong. It is not the law, and it never has been. And, obviously, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater — especially if, you know, the theater is on fire. Rogan says nothing in response to this, and Zuckerberg knows he’s got a willing mark. If you can get away with the small bullshit, you can get away with the big bullshit, right?
For his part, Rogan serves up Zuckerberg a series of softballs, setting his own tone by referring to content moderation as “censorship.” The idea that the government was forcing Zuckerberg to “censor” news about covid and covid vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the election is something of a running theme throughout the interview. When Zuckerberg isn’t outright lying about any of this, he’s quite vague — but in case you were wondering, a man who was formally rebuked by the city of San Francisco for putting his name on a hospital while his platforms spread health misinformation thinks that “on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative.” Whew!
Misinformation on Facebook started well before the 2016 election — as early as 2014, scammers were spreading Ebola lies on Facebook. Shortly after the 2016 election, Adam Mosseri — then Facebook’s VP of product management — said in a statement that Facebook was combating fake news but “there’s so much more we need to do.” Facebook did receive criticism for spreading fake news, including misinformation that benefitted President Donald Trump, but even then, Zuckerberg wasn’t having it. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news,” Zuckerberg said.
Still, in the 2020 election, Facebook — along with other social media networks — took a harsher stance on fake news, making it harder for Macedonian teenagers to make a profit off Trump supporters. During his Rogan interview, Zuckerberg now characterizes this intervention as giving “too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, okay, there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation.”
Facebook implemented a fact-checking program, one that involved partners such as the conservative online magazine The Dispatch, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and USA Today. In a concession to Donald Trump’s second presidency, implemented before Trump even took the oath of office, Zuckerberg has said Facebook will end the program. “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in the video announcing the move.
On the Rogan show, Zuckerberg went further in describing the fact-checking program he’d implemented: “It’s something out of like 1984.” He says the fact-checkers were “too biased,” though he doesn’t say exactly how.
The problem wasn’t that the fact-checking was bad; it was that conservatives are more likely to share misinformation and get fact-checked, as some research has shown. That means conservatives are also more likely to be moderated. In this sense, perhaps it wasn’t Facebook’s fact-checking systems that had a liberal bias, but reality.
Well, Zuckerberg’s out of the business of reality now. I am sympathetic to the difficulties social media platforms faced in trying to moderate during covid — where rapidly-changing information about the pandemic was difficult to keep up with and conspiracy theories ran amok. I’m just not convinced it happened the way Zuckerberg describes. Zuckerberg whines about being pushed by the Biden administration to fact-check claims: “These people from the Biden administration would call up our team, and, like, scream at them, and curse,” Zuckerberg says.
“Did you record any of these phone calls?” Rogan asks.
“I don’t know,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think we were.”
Rogan then asks who, specifically, was pressuring Facebook. And Zuckerberg has no answer: “It was people in the Biden administration,” he says. “I think it was, you know, I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly, but I think it was.”
But the biggest lie of all is a lie of omission: Zuckerberg doesn’t mention the relentless pressure conservatives have placed on the company for years — which has now clearly paid off. Zuckerberg is particularly full of shit here because Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released Zuckerberg’s internal communications which document this!
In his letter to Jordan’s committee, Zuckerberg writes, “Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down.” Emphasis mine. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Those emails also reveal Zuckerberg wanted to blame the Biden White House for how Facebook chose to moderate the “lab leak” conspiracy theory of covid origins. “Can we include that the WH put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?” he asked in a WhatsApp chat. His former president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, responded, “I don’t think they put specific pressure on that theory.”
Joel Kaplan, the former George W. Bush advisor who has now replaced Clegg, said that blaming the White House for Facebook’s behavior would “supercharge” conservatives who believed the social media giant was “collaborating” with the Biden administration. “If they’re more interested in criticizing us than actually solving the problems, then I’m not sure how it’s helping the cause to engage with them further,” Zuckerberg wrote. This doesn’t seem to show that the Biden administration successfully censored anything.
They kind of found some theory they wanted to investigate. And it’s like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard, right? To like, to like, find, find some theory, but it, like, I don’t know. It just, it kind of, like, throughout the, the, the, the, the party and the government, there was just sort of, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know how this stuff works. I mean, I’ve never been in government. I don’t know if it’s like a directive or it’s just like a quiet consensus that like, we don’t like these guys. They’re not doing what we want. We’re going to punish them. But, but it’s, it’s, it’s tough to be at the other end of that.
This is a compelling demonstration that jujitsu and MMA training (or hunting pigs in Hawaii or making your neck real thick or whatever) isn’t going to help you act aggressive if you’re constitutionally bitchmade. Blaming the CFPB for a witch-hunt when we’ve all watched Republicans target Facebook really is something! That’s what this whole performance is about: getting Trump, Vance, Jordan and the rest of the Republican party to lay off. After all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal cost Facebook just $5 billion — chump change, really. If Zuckerberg plays ball, his next privacy whoopsie could be even cheaper.
In fact, Zuckerberg even offers Republicans another target: Apple. According to Zuckerberg, the way Apple makes money is “by basically, like, squeezing people.” Among his complaints:
Apple’s 30 percent commission on App Store sales
Airpods work better with Apple phones than all other headphones
Apple wouldn’t let Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Bans connect to iOS using the same quick-setup protocol Airpods use
iMessage is a walled garden, and groupchats go wonky if there’s a person with an Android phone in there
“I mean at some point I did this like back of the envelope calculation of like all the random rules that Apple puts out. If you know, if they didn’t apply, like I think you know, it’s like — and this is just Meta, I think we’d like, make twice as much profit or something.”
At least some of these Apple issues actually matter — there is a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the important one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in newspaper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is generally no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.
But Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all. Getting Rogan’s listeners riled up about Zuckerberg’s enemies and finding Republicans a new tech company target is just a coincidence, as are the changes to allow more hate speech on his platforms happening now, changes that just happen to pacify Republicans. All of this has nothing to do with the incoming administration, Zuckerberg tells Rogan. “I think a lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing, because they kind of look at the timing and they’re like, hey, well, you’re doing this right after the election.” he says. “We try to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse.”
And did this work? Did Zuckerberg’s gambit to talk about how social media needed more “masculine energy” win over the bros? Well, Barstool’s Dave Portnoy isn’t fooled by this shit.
Zuckerberg is such a spineless jellyfish. Somebody from Biden’s team (unnamed) told his team to take stuff down so he rolled over. Trump gets elected and suddenly he’s a new man. pic.twitter.com/ZOIKJkrLvs
I don’t know. I did think it was pretty funny that after all these complaints about government “censorship,” Zuckerberg didn’t say a word about Trump and the Republicans’ efforts at it. After all, Trump, the incoming president who has on occasion threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison, was recently asked if the Facebook changes were in response to his threats.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks Apple “[hasn’t] really invented anything great in a while” and that it has been coasting off of its past success. “Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” he said this week.
The conversation actually started with Rogan’s issues with Apple. Rogan said he’s moving “from Apple to Android” in part because he doesn’t “like being attached to one company.” He also isn’t a fan of Apple’s App Store policies. “The way they do that Apple store, where they charge people 30 percent,” he said. “That seems so insane that they can get away with doing that.”
“I have some opinions about this,” Zuckerberg said. While he gives credit to the iPhone as “obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time,” he argued that Apple has put rules in place that “feel arbitrary.”
Zuckerberg said that Apple has “thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way” as Apple’s own products, like the AirPods. If Apple let other people use its protocol, “there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there,” Zuckerberg said.
Naturally, there’s business behind Zuckerberg’s gripes. Meta has had longstanding issues with Apple and the 30 percent cut it takes on some App Store transactions. Apple’s iOS restrictions have made it harder for Meta to compete on hardware and wiped out billions of dollars in advertising. Zuckerberg said that if Apple’s “random rules” didn’t apply, Meta would make “twice as much profit or something” based on his “back of the envelope calculation.”
Apple is increasingly under pressure to open up. It’s made changes in the European Union in response to new laws targeting its policies, and it’s facing a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice for holding a monopoly over smartphones. But the company seems intent on maintaining its closed ecosystem until it’s forced to change.
Zuckerberg believes that Apple’s reliance on “just advantaging their stuff” will ultimately hurt the company. Apple has “been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things,” he said. He said that the tech industry is “super dynamic,” and “if you just don’t do a good job for like 10 years, eventually, you’re just going to get beat by someone.” (It’s easy to guess who Zuckerberg thinks that might be!)
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s remarks.
Zuckerberg touched on a lot of other tech topics as part of his conversation with Rogan, including AI and how he thinks about screen time with his daughter playing Minecraft. One area he spent some time on was neural interfaces and how physical and digital worlds will blend together.
He thinks that “it’s going to be a while before we’re really widely deploying anything that jacks into your brain,” for example, and (naturally) he talked about the benefits of a wrist-based neural interface, which Meta is working on as part of its Orion augmented reality glasses.
Down the line, Zuckerberg envisions a world where you’ll be able to use the neural interface wristband and the glasses to text a friend or an AI and have the glasses give you the answer. He also believes that as smart glasses or even contact lenses as a computing platform become more developed, the internet will be “overlaid” on the physical world.
“I think we’ll basically be in this wild world where most of the world will be physical, but there will be this increasing amount of virtual objects or people who are beaming in or hologramming into different things to interact in different ways,” he said.
“There isn’t a physical world and a digital world anymore,” he added. “We’re in 2025. It’s one world.”
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Like Meta, Amazon is ending some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. In a memo sent last month, Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company has been “winding down outdated programs and materials” related to its efforts around representation and inclusion, as reported earlier by CNBC and Bloomberg.
In the memo, a copy of which Amazon provided to The Verge,Castleberry wrote that over the past few years, Amazon has been evaluating its programs across the company, each of which “addresses a specific disparity, and is designed to end when that disparity is eliminated.” At the same time, Castleberry noted that the company worked to “build programs that are open to all” instead of having “individual groups build programs.” Castleberry said Amazon aimed to complete the discontinuation of some of these “outdated” programs by the end of 2024.
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Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a "hacking-as-a-service" scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company’s platform for AI-generated content.
The foreign-based defendants developed tools specifically designed to bypass safety guardrails Microsoft has erected to prevent the creation of harmful content through its generative AI services, said Steven Masada, the assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. They then compromised the legitimate accounts of paying customers. They combined those two things to create a fee-based platform people could use.
A sophisticated scheme
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If you're in the market for a new controller, you're in luck. Microsoft's Xbox Elite Series 2 Core controller is on sale for $98 at Amazon and Target, down from $130. That means its about $3 off its lowest price to date — a great opportunity to upgrade to something a little nicer.
We've recommended the Xbox Elite Series 2 Core controller before, and that's mainly based on its ability to give you the best of the $180 Xbox Elite Series 2 controller for a more approachable price. That includes fits and finishes like a rubberized grip and sturdier, longer-lasting versions of a traditional controller's triggers, joysticks and directional pad (it's circular now). On top of that, it has up to 40 hours of battery life.
The Elite Series 2 Core also lets you adjust the tension of the joysticks and triggers to your liking, and remap the controller's buttons in the Xbox Accessories app. That's helpful if there's specific settings your prefer for Call of Duty: Warzone versus something more relaxing, like Viva Piñata, or if you share your controller with someone else.
The main disadvantage with the Xbox Elite Series 2 Core controller, besides the limited color options you have purchasing it anywhere other than the Xbox Design Lab, are the lack of accessories. Included in the price for a normal Xbox Elite Series 2 controller is a variety of different joysticks, directional pads and back paddles you can attach when you want to experiment with a new setup. Those aren't included at all with the Core controller. In fact, there's awkward divots on the back of the controller where the paddles are supposed to be attached.
It's a small annoyance in the grand scheme of things, and one that can be rectified by buying the accessories when you figure out that you actually need them down the road. Even without paddles, the Xbox Elite Series 2 Core controller should feel noticeably more pleasant to use, and when you're trying to make your way through an extra-long RPG, that's what really matters anyway.
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