What Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘masculine energy’ speech might mean for the future of meta.
As the inauguration season approaches, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been positioning his company for a second Trump term.
Four years ago, on January 6, 2010, Metta kicked Donald Trump off the stage. Now, he’s donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and Zuckerberg says the tech sector needs more “man power” along with a revival of a corporate culture that “celebrates aggression.”
He gave his opinion The Joe Rogan Experience The podcast comes amid major structural and cultural changes at parent company Facebook and Instagram, including third-party fact-checking and changing policies to allow insults against certain vulnerable groups.
His move offers insight into how the winds of political change could fuel more divisiveness on social media — and limit diversity in an already homogenous tech sector, media experts say.
Celebrating the attack
One of the main talking points of Zuckerberg’s speech was the idea that corporate workplaces are distancing themselves from certain masculinity.
“Male energy is great, and obviously society has a lot of it, but I think corporate culture has been trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said. A nearly three-hour conversation with Rogan.
“I think developing a culture that respects violence has its merits,” he added.
Robert Lawson, associate professor of sociolinguistics at Birmingham City University in England, who studies the relationship between language and masculinity online and offline, says that language is important.
Zuckerberg says it’s surprising that he’s being called to be more masculine, especially since technology is such a male-dominated field.
In the year As of June 2022, only 37.1 percent of global Meta platform employees were women. Women hold only 25.8 percent of technology roles and 36.7 percent of leadership roles From statistics to information.
Lawson calls this kind of discourse a “damaged right” that people who have long been at the center of society and who are increasingly seeking diversity and inclusion may not feel the same way.
“And they were angry,” he added.
Lawson said the sentiment is becoming more mainstream in the US because of the “masculinity” that Trump represents.
But what does this kind of talk mean for Meta’s future — both its workplace and its flagship products, Facebook and Instagram?
Changes can lead to ‘slow erosion’ towards minority groups.
After the US election, Zuckerberg made various structural and cultural changes to better align with the incoming Trump administration.
The shift comes when the meta is set. Go to trial in April In a lawsuit filed by the US Federal Trade Commission over its purchase of social media platforms Instagram and WhatsApp to destroy competition.
Joe Rogan’s interview was released just days after Meta announced major changes to its content moderation policy that drew praise from Trump, who said the company had “come a long way.”
Some big tech executives, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have pledged big donations to President-elect Donald Trump’s graduation fund. Tech analyst Carmi Levy said it was an attempt to ‘coddle’ Trump, who is known as a ‘marketing’ leader.
The new guidelines, which ban insults about someone’s mental or mental illness, are now an exception and allow users to make posts accusing 2SLGBTQ+ people of being mentally ill because they are gay or transgender.
The company defends them by prioritizing freedom of expression, but even free speech advocates have called for exemptions that target vulnerable groups.
Meta did not respond to CBC News’ request for comment on the changes.
Completing diversification efforts, reducing costs
The company said it would end many of its diversity and inclusion efforts, sparking outrage among some. Internally, nearly 400 employees responded to the announcement with a crying emoji. Some called it “tragic.” A report from Business Insider.
New York Times He reported that staff were ordered to remove tampons from the men’s restroom.
Lawson thinks these changes will lead to a “slow erosion” of women and various minority groups working and participating in meta-forums.
He said it all comes down to “the threat of decentralization among young men” and an attempt to regain control of places.
“I think it actually takes those communities out of the debate from the alt-right, the more toxic and problematic people.”
The company is ceasing third-party fact-checking in the US, a move that Dozens of fact-checking organizations They criticized.
“If you allow the most harmful users to flourish on your platform, the non-harmful ones will leave,” The Verge senior writer Elizabeth Lopato reports on finance and technology.
She believes these changes are “ideologically motivated” and attempts to “reduce costs” by Meta, which is reported to be planning to cut five percent of its workforce globally this year.
“You might want to get rid of a portion of your workforce and encourage them to leave, like, hey, now it’s going to be a tragedy for you,” Lopato said.
What happens now?
The company is making personnel changes.
In addition to his massive donation to the president-elect, Zuckerberg put UFC CEO and longtime Trump ally Dana White on Meta’s board and replaced the company’s policy chief, Nick Clegg, with former Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan. Relationship with the party.
“With all the trips Mark Zuckerberg has made to Mar-a-Lago, it’s clear he has a wish list … so I think there’s a certain amount of horse-trading going on here,” Lopato said.
Lopato says this stereotype of traditional masculinity is not new in tech spaces.
Zuckerberg started his career at Harvard University by creating FaceMash (which eventually led to the creation of Facebook), a website used to rate the beauty of women.
In a 2014 articleFormer Facebook employee and Mark Zuckerberg obituary Kathryn Losey writes about how FaceMash’s gender dynamics continue to evolve at Facebook. Referring to the Harvard study Women comprise the majority of profiles viewed on the site, and men are the majority of profile viewers and site creators.
Lopato said: “It (Facebook) was not welcoming to women. And looking at the diversity statistics, it probably still isn’t.”
As for the future, Lopato points to what happened in 2020 at the cryptocurrency exchange site Coinbase. That same year, dozens of employees left their CEO The company has promised not to engage in social activism.
