Look At This Loser

Mark Zuckerberg's kowtowing to Trump is noxious and ugly. But most of all, it's pathetic.

Fox News

First of all, Mark Zuckerberg looks ridiculous. You are 40 years old and one of the most infamous nerds around. As a non-cool person in his late 30s, I say this with—well, not love, there’s a lot of malice here, but I say it anyway: you do not look like a more relatable bro in his glow-up era, or whatever stupid nonsense you’re trying to convey, you look like a clown and a giant tool. Enough of this.

OK, glad to get that part off my chest.

For those of you who missed this news, Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that he’s tearing up his company’s current efforts to police misinformation and bigotry on its platforms. Why? Because Donald Trump is about to be the president again. There was a lot of blah blah about censorship and bias in the announcement, but that’s really the long and the short of it. Trump is back, so it’s time for Zuck to play ball, particularly on issues like “immigration and gender” (read: trans people).

As our friend

Parker Molloy

noted on her blog, Zuckerberg wasn’t subtle about how directly this was all aimed at the MAGA movement. He dispatched his new head PR guy, Republican Joel Kaplan, to Fox News to hype the announcement. He vowed to copy Elon Musk’s “community notes” feature from X. He added UFC chief and Trump stan Dana White to his corporate board. He even said he was moving his content moderators from California to Texas, where they will presumably lose the woke brain worms that infected them over on the coast. Also, you can now refer to women as property, gay people as mentally ill, or trans people as “it” on Facebook if you want. Now that’s progress.

I don’t really have much to say about the specifics of these moves. They are noxious and will probably make things worse online, but there’s been tons of bullshit on Facebook forever, and it’s not as though Meta has been a sterling example of civic responsibility till now. To give just two examples, Facebook helped cause a genocide in Myanmar, and Meta has been systematically suppressing news about the genocide in Gaza. This is a bad company run by a bad person, and it always has been. Nothing new there.

Instead, I just want to reflect on how pathetic this all is. We have a 40-year-old worth $213 billion trying to look like a 22-year-old TikToker while throwing bribe after bribe Donald Trump’s way in the hopes that Trump won’t be mean to him or his business interests. We have Jeff Bezos paying $40 million for what is sure to be a ridiculous documentary project about Melania Trump (made by disgraced director Brett Ratner, of all people). We have Sam Altman donating $1 million of his own money to Trump’s inauguration fund.

It’s not that I expected any better from these people. They’ve never had any real moral code—they’re just in it for themselves and their money. But these guys (and they’re all guys) love to swagger around as masters of the universe, reveling in the power they have over the rest of us. Going “if I move some of my people to Texas will you stop bothering me” is not a power move. Going “Donald if I pay $40 million for a puff piece about your objectively uninteresting spouse will you be my friend” is not a power move. It’s loser behavior. These are, ultimately, very small people, and they look smaller and smaller every day.