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by carlosdp 508 days ago
Idk, this article assumes that the company before the recent changes reflected his beliefs of how companies should be run. But the way I see it, it's pretty clear he disagreed with a lot of it, and just felt too much pressure (internal from employees, external from the media) to not fall in line.

Does no one remember that in the 2010s, Zuck went around trying to advocate against the calls for censoring "disinformation", arguing free speech shouldn't be regulated by a company? These types of views aren't new for him, they were aggressively suppressed by the press which published thousands of articles calling his ideas anything from "reckless" to "violent."[1][2]

At some point, he gave in, in part because the new administration very much agreed with the media on this (and again, many of Meta's employees). But now he has the political cover to run things the way he actually wants to, which we can see from his public remarks years ago.

So, you can I guess call him a "coward," but it would be misinformed, in my opinion, to claim he's a coward because he's seemingly kowtowing to the Trump people in the changes he's making. On the contrary, if anything he was a being a coward before by not following through on his true convictions!

(fwiw, I don't agree any of this is cowardice. It's extremely difficult to run a company at that scale and try to keep everyone happy, and he's only human at the end of the day. The author simply disagrees with his currently expressed opinions. If he agreed, she might be calling him a hero, though probably not. I also think laying the NIH stuff at his feet is a huge non-sequitor. Zuck has nothing to do with any of that, idk what she's expecting he's supposed to do about it?)

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/18/mark-zuckerberg-georgetown-s... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=mark+zuckerberg+tour+talking...

1 comments

> Does no one remember that in the 2010s, Zuck went around trying to advocate against the calls for censoring "disinformation", arguing free speech shouldn't be regulated by a company?

Nope! I remember it too. It was impressive at the time. All the CEOs standing in line acting like there's no problem with a ministry of truth approach, and Mark was the only one who said the obviously correct thing. I've liked him since then.