There are persistent rumors that Zuckerberg wants to get into national politics. The spin will ramp up to neutron-star velocities when that happens. It's probably safe to stop believing anything they say, starting right about now.
He is literally doing a whistlestop tour around America right now, replete with bizarrely folksy essays laced with nakedly political rhetoric. Not so much a rumor as an impression he appears to be intentionally cultivating
Well, Trump has shown that the populace is accepting of businessmen as leaders. I'm sure if the rumors are true Zuckerberg won't be the last to think they can parlay success and fame into political power, and he wasn't the first (Reagon comes to mind).
Reagan was an actor, not a businessman. He did shill though.
Zuckerberg is waking up
to how easily manipulable the portion of Americans who voted for Trump are. It's too easy. Just look at the republican response to sb18 in CA. The counseling association was suppossed to be working on an initiative to help but I'm starting to worry.
There's some truth in this (I assume), but there is quite a bit of evidence that those on the right value conformity with a leader's views more than those on the left. The infamous poll results on the Syrian strike[1] show this behavior. I'm not sure this counts as manipulation exactly, but sometimes the effect is the same.
I used to believe the same thing until the aftermath of this election. It's not even remotely in the same ballpark. It's like the Dunning-Krueger effect except there's two more peaks in the 0-20% range, and a lot of people with an island of intelligence in their career path outside that range.
Trump is about American nationalism, and he resonated with the poorer parts of the country by talking about making America great again. He's also "old school". Zuckerberg is in most ways the opposite.
> It's probably safe to stop believing anything they say, starting right about now.
It was safe to stop believing anything they say after facebook got caught neck deep in wrongdoings and apologized for the first time. IIRC this was circa early 2004 or late 2003 and it's been downhill from there.
Haha I started at least five years ago, the fourteenth time I heard someone complaining about automatically-changed FB privacy settings. Fool me thirteen times... Thus I wasn't surprised by #JeSuisCharlie or the recent wall-building kerfuffle.
