Mark Zuckerberg masks himself and abandons diversity

Mark Zuckerberg is finally ready to be his true self. Surprise: he bursts out.

A new one report from the New York Times details how Zuck leveraged a small team of executives to help reshape the Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as he sees fit. So far, this is included end fact checking, rolling back moderation rules that protects marginalized people, and increases the algorithm to promote more political content. Now, for a memo to employees obtained from AxiosYou can add diversity, equity and inclusion to the list of principles that Zuckerberg’s businesses are built on.

The company announced that it will ax its DEI team, stop attempts to work with minority-owned supplier companies, and end representation goals, among other policy reversals. The changes will take effect immediately.

This shift to the right follows Zuckerberg’s trip to Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving, where he spent time with President-elect Donald Trump. But, according to the Times, this has been bubbling over Meta’s CEO for some time. He is said to have felt compelled to take up “progressive” causes — you know, those radical left-aligned beliefs like “equal opportunity is good” and “you shouldn’t just lie about things” — from its employees and external forces. Behind the scenes, the Times says he spoke with Poor loon Marc Andreessen and others about how he wants to take a “free speech” approach to running his companies.

Interestingly, Zuckerberg’s techno-libertarian version of “free speech” looks a lot like “suppression of marginalized people” in practice. Zuck, along with his small circle of like-minded ghouls, rewrite the company’s content moderation policies in a way that forbids saying “white people have a mental illness”, but would allow saying “gay people have a mental illness”, for example. The company too pulled transgender and non-binary topic options from their Messenger chat app.

And then there is the decision to end DEI programs. Meta stated that the reason he made the call was because “the legal and political landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.” In the memo obtained by Axios, Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, cited recent Supreme Court decisions “signaling a shift in the way courts will approach DEI” — an apparent reference to the ruling of SCOTUS of cancel affirmative action programs in the admissions offices at the university, and also a next one case of “reverse discrimination”. the court will feel that it could set a precedent for attacking DEI initiatives.

But more than that, it seems the decision is an extension of Zuckerberg’s worldview. His friends in the Silicon Valley venture capital world have spent years explain DEI programsimagining the kings of meritocracy and delighting in the idea that someone from a less privileged background would face any discrimination if he were indeed able as their counterparts. Of course, the reality is that meritocracy is a myth. In fact, studies have found believing that achievements are the result of merit results in less empathy and more discriminatory behavior.

This is a decided departure from how the company has presented itself in recent years. After all, the company only successfully defended one of his DEI efforts in court last summer. In 2023, Meta publicly said“Our commitment to DEI remains at the heart of who we are as a company.” And just two years ago, Meta published a diversity report highlighting how it was able to attract more talent from marginalized communities by hiring more remote workers. (The company has since issued a return to office order what you do disproportionately affected those same workers.)

From all the decisions that Zuckerberg has made in his company in recent weeks, it is clear that there is a type of diversity that he is really made: Diversity of thought that does not agree with him.