Mark Zuckerberg lies about content moderation to Joe Rogan’s face.

Let me tell you briefly, based on my experience hearing one of the richest men in the world cry. Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience is full of lies.

Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, set the tone from the beginning: “If you believe in giving people a voice, I think at some level you only start one of these companies, right?”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I remember Zuckerberg’s first attempt at getting rich. FaceMash was a clone of HotOrNot, uploading photos of fellow female students to be rated without their consent. “Giving people a voice” seems to be one way to describe it. Personally I’d call it “creepy shit.”

Early in the interview, Zuckerberg tests the waters to see how much backlash he will receive. Rogan is a notoriously soft interviewer. It’s like listening to your stupid friend having a conversation. But he sometimes challenges his guests. So Zuckerberg says the First Amendment has its limits, saying, “It’s like you can’t start a fire in a crowded theater.”

“Fire in a crowded theater” makes every lawyer I know froth at the mouth. Because it’s completely wrong. That is not the law and never has been. And obviously you ~can do Shout “Fire” in a crowded theater. In particular, as you know, There was a fire in the theater. Rogan says nothing about it, and Zuckerberg knows he’s willing to score points. If you can avoid the little nonsense, you can avoid the big nonsense, right?

Rogan set his tone by giving Zuckerberg a series of softballs, referring to content moderation as “censorship.” The idea that the government forced Zuckerberg to “censor” news about covid and the covid vaccine, Hunter Biden’s laptop and the election was a running theme throughout the interview. When Zuckerberg isn’t outright lying about this, he’s being very vague. But in case you’re wondering, here’s what one man who was officially reprimanded by the city of San Francisco for putting his name on a hospital while the platform spread health misinformation: “On balance, the vaccine has more positives than negatives.” Whew!

Misinformation on Facebook began long before the 2016 election. Scammers have been spreading Ebola-related lies on Facebook since as early as 2014. Shortly after the 2016 election, Adam Mosseri, then Facebook’s vice president of product management, said in a statement that the company was fighting fake news but that “there is much more we need to do.” Facebook has been criticized for spreading fake news, including misinformation that benefits President Donald Trump, but Zuckerberg didn’t realize this. “I think there’s a huge lack of empathy in arguing that the only reason someone could vote that way is because they saw fake news,” Zuckerberg said.

Nonetheless, in the 2020 election, Facebook, along with other social media networks, took a harsher stance against fake news, making it more difficult for Macedonian youth to profit from Trump supporters. In the Rogan interview, Zuckerberg now characterized the intervention as “basically giving too much deference to a lot of people in the media who are saying this guy couldn’t have been elected without misinformation.”

Facebook has implemented a fact-checking program involving partners such as conservative online magazines. detachmentReuters, Agence France-Presse and USA Today. In a concession to Donald Trump for the second presidency, Zuckerberg said Facebook would end the program even before Trump took office. “We will go back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the move.

On the Rogan show, Zuckerberg went into more detail about the fact-checking program he has implemented. 1984.” He said fact-checkers were “too biased,” but did not specify exactly how.

The problem isn’t that fact checking is bad. Some studies have shown that conservatives are more likely to share misinformation and get it fact-checked. This means conservatives are more likely to become moderate. In this sense, it may not be Facebook’s fact-checking system that has a progressive bias; reality.

Well, Zuckerberg is now out of real trouble. I empathize with the challenges social media platforms face trying to adjust during COVID-19, when it’s difficult to keep up with rapidly changing information about the pandemic and conspiracy theories are rampant. I’m not sure it happened the way Zuckerberg describes. Zuckerberg whines about forcing the Biden administration to fact-check the claims. “These people in the Biden administration will call our team and scream and curse,” Zuckerberg says.

“Did you record these phone calls?” Logan asks.

“I don’t know,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t think we were.”

Rogan then asks specifically who put pressure on Facebook. And Zuckerberg has no answer. “It was people in the Biden administration,” he says. “I wasn’t directly involved in that conversation, but I think it was.”

But the biggest lies are lies of omission. Zuckerberg made no mention of the relentless pressure conservatives have placed on the company for years. This has now clearly paid off. Zuckerberg is full of shit here, especially since Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released Zuckerberg’s internal communications documenting this!

In his letter to the Jordan Committee, Zuckerberg wrote:Ultimately, it was our decision to take down the content or not..” My emphasis. “As I told our team at the time, we feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from the administration, from either direction. If this happens again, we are prepared to push back.”

The emails also show that Zuckerberg wanted to criticize the Biden White House for the way Facebook chose to tweak the “lab leak” conspiracy theory about covid origins. “Can you include the fact that WH pressured 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’re putting any particular pressure on that theory.”

Joel Kaplan, a former adviser to George W. Bush who is now representing Clegg, said criticizing the White House for Facebook’s actions would “strengthen” conservatives who believe the social media giant is “collaborating” with the Biden administration. “If they’re more interested in criticizing us than actually solving the problem, I’m not sure how that helps the cause to engage with them more,” Zuckerberg wrote. This doesn’t seem to show that the Biden administration has successfully censored anything.

In fact, many of Facebook’s controversial moderation requests were made during the pandemic. erase management. Consider, for example, the “Plandemic” video scam. Facebook removed the video in 2020. Joe Biden took office in 2021. If Zuckerberg was dealing with an administration that was pressuring him on this; It was the Trump administration. The Biden White House may have engaged in a similar public relations effort, but it was joining what was already a lively discussion about Facebook moderation.

Facebook has been targeted by Republican lawmakers, including Jordan, Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senator Marsha Blackburn, and Vice President-elect JD Vance. In the boring and meaningless congressional hearings that Zuckerberg has endured for years, most of the people who have threatened him have been conservatives. They often called on him to comment directly on conspiracy theories or reinstate individual trolls on his platform.

But Zuckerberg didn’t mention anything to Logan. Instead, he was upset that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had begun investigating him for allegedly improperly using financial information to target ads. What does Zuckerberg have to say about this? Well, let me tell you right away.

They discovered several theories they wanted to investigate. And it seems like they were trying really hard. Right? I like it, I like it, I look for it, I look for some theory, but I don’t know. It’s just, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, across the party and across the government, I don’t know if that’s ever happened, I don’t know how this works. That said, I have never been in government. I don’t know if it’s like a directive or a quiet agreement that we don’t like these people. They don’t do what we want. We will punish them. But, but it’s hard to be on the other side.

This is convincing evidence that Jiu-Jitsu and MMA training (hunting pigs in Hawaii, thickening your neck, etc.) will not help you behave aggressively if you have a bad constitution. As we all watched, the CFPB was accused of a witch hunt. republican What is Target Facebook really? This is what fires Trump, Vance, Jordan and the rest of the Republicans. Ultimately, the Cambridge Analytica scandal cost Facebook $5 billion. This is a truly ridiculous change. If Zuckerberg throws the ball, his next privacy challenge could be a lot cheaper.

In fact, Zuckerberg even suggested another target for Republicans: Apple. According to Zuckerberg, the way Apple makes money is “basically by squeezing people out.” Among his complaints:

• Apple charges a 30% commission on App Store sales.
• Airpods work better with Apple phones than any other headphones.
• Apple won’t allow Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Bans to connect to iOS using the same quick setup protocol that Airpods use.
• iMessage is a walled garden, so group chats become unstable if someone has an Android phone.
• “I mean at some point I did this like a back-of-the-envelope calculation, like every random rule Apple comes up with. As you can see, if it doesn’t apply, it’s just meta. “I think we want to double our profits.”

At least some of these Apple issues actually matter. There is a legitimate DOJ antitrust lawsuit against the company. But that’s not how Zuckerberg feels. This last point is an important one from his perspective. He’s held a long-standing grudge against Apple since the company implemented tracking prevention features in its default browser, Safari. Facebook also criticized this change in newspaper advertising. Social media companies are said to have lost nearly $10 billion due to this policy. Financial Times; Facebook “absolutely” lost the most money. If you ask people if they want to be tracked, the answer is usually no. This is bad for Facebook’s business.

But Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all. It’s just a coincidence that Rogan’s listeners are getting angry about Zuckerberg’s enemies and looking to the Republican Party as a new tech company target, as are the changes that now allow for more hate speech on his platform, changes that are happening to appease the Republican Party . All of this naught As for the incoming administration, Zuckerberg tells Rogan: “I think a lot of people see this as a purely political thing, because they look at the timing and think they’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 ploy to talk about the need for more “masculine energy” on social media win over the brothers? Well, Barstool’s Dave Portnoy isn’t fooled by this shit.

I don’t know. I thought it was pretty funny that despite all these complaints about government “censorship,” Zuckerberg hasn’t said a word about Trump and the Republican Party’s efforts to combat it. After all, President-elect Trump, who has at times threatened to jail Zuckerberg, was recently asked whether Facebook’s changes were a response to his threats.

“Maybe so,” Trump said.