Meta messaging: What this country needs is more testosterone

A lawyer representing Meta in a copyright case said he was dropping the company as a client due to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity.”

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Mark Lemley, a partner at law firm Lex Lumina PLLC and director of Stanford Law School’s Program in Law, Science & Technology said he was firing the social media giant as a client in a social media post on Monday.

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The move comes as employees and associates of the social media company grapple with their founder’s apparent attempts to pivot rightward before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week.

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Lemley was previously defending Meta in an ongoing copyright infringement case filed by writers including novelist Richard Kadrey and comedian Sarah Silverman, who claim the company trained their generative AI model Llama using their copyrighted works obtained through piracy websites.

  Daily Beast

Last week, Meta announced a series of changes to its content moderation policies and enforcement strategies designed to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. The company ended its fact-checking program in the United States, stopped scanning new posts for most policy violations, and created carve-outs in its community standards to allow dehumanizing speech about transgender people and immigrants. The company also killed its diversity, equity and inclusion program.

Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation.

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The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.

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[A]fter the company’s own analyses found that [its AI] classifiers could reduce the reach of these hoaxes by more than 90 percent, Meta is shutting them off.

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The company plans to replace its professional fact-checking program with volunteers from the user base appending information to posts in a system modeled after X’s community notes. But Meta has offered few details on how the program will work, and has not said when it will become available.

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For now, these changes only apply to the United States.

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Zuckerberg announced today that he would cut another 5 percent of his workforce, or around 3,600 people, targeting “low performers.” Most layoffs inspire a significant number of demoralized employees to quit; this move should be taken as another push toward the door for employees who believe in newly taboo ideas such as that Meta should employ men and women in equal numbers.

  Platformer

Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of “culturally neutered” companies that have sought to distance themselves from “masculine energy”, adding that it’s good if a culture “celebrates the aggression a bit more”.

“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,” Mr Zuckerberg said during an almost three-hour-long conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan published on Friday.

  Financial Review

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/17/2025: