Mark blames Sheryl

Programming note: Platformer is off Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

In August of last year, amid a Republican investigation into how the Biden administration had pressured tech platforms to remove content, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the head of the House Judiciary Committee criticizing government pressure.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Meta’s CEO wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. 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.”

Three months later, Zuckerberg found himself in a new political reality. Republicans won the Senate, and Donald Trump — who that same August had threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for the rest of his life due to the CEO’s nonpartisan donations to support election infrastructure — won the presidency. Republicans had long pressured Zuckerberg in the opposite direction: to leave up posts about COVID-19, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, or whatever other narratives served their agenda — but in Zuckerberg’s letter these went unmentioned. In retrospect, it marked the beginning of a new effort on Zuckerberg’s part to make peace with Republicans, by accepting their critique of Meta’s platforms wholeheartedly and without complaint. 

As part of this effort, Zuckerberg has agreed to participate in a public shame ritual: to express regret for having acceded to Democratic pressure in the Biden years, while actively identifying ways that he and Meta can accede to Republican pressure in the Trump years to come.

On Thursday, we learned that part of this ritual involved privately pledging to Trump adviser Stephen Miller that Meta would dismantle its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and blamed the company’s previously more inclusive culture on his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. 

Here are Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, David A. Fahrenthold, and Charlie Savage in the New York Times:

Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products.

Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.

And so on one hand Zuckerberg complains that phone calls and emails urging the removal of COVID-related content represents undue government pressure — but when the new government seeks to dismantle programs that resulted in the hiring and promotion of more women and people of color, Zuckerberg agreed to do it before the next president was even inaugurated.

The Times report, which Meta declined to comment on, comes a few days after Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that companies need more “masculine energy.” And for women in the workplace, few forms of masculine energy are more familiar than a top executive blaming a woman for the fallout of programs and policies that he agreed to and oversaw.