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The MAGAfication of Facebook continued apace this weekend, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced a slate of extra modifications meant to appease President-elect Donald Trump earlier than jetting down to Mar-a-Lago to satisfy with him once more.
In addition to axing his firm’s fact-checking program, rolling again content material moderation, and elevating Republican executives and board members—all strikes that Zuckerberg made final week—Meta may even finish its variety, fairness, and inclusion initiatives, launched to deal with the dearth of ladies, Black, and Hispanic employees within the tech trade.
But Zuckerberg, in a Friday look on Joe Rogan’s podcast, basically argued that these packages have labored too properly. “I think it’s one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that masculinity is bad,” Zuckerberg stated. “I just think we swung culturally to that part of the spectrum where it’s all like, ‘Masculinity is toxic we have to, like, get rid of it.’”
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” he added. “I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
It’s an odd declare coming from the CEO of an organization the place males outnumber ladies by nearly two to 1: In 2022, the newest yr of Meta’s reported worker knowledge, solely 37% of its employees had been feminine—a determine that hasn’t budged since Meta started reporting it 5 years earlier. The identical is true of Silicon Valley as a complete, the place ladies, Black, and Hispanic employees stay dramatically underrepresented regardless of years of (kind of honest) company variety efforts. Just final September, a brand new evaluation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission discovered that ladies in tech made zero illustration good points over the previous era.
What has modified, nevertheless, is the temper in each Washington and San Francisco. An ascendant pressure of swaggering, “anti-woke” pondering has recently contaminated Silicon Valley, the place a sequence of high-profile tech bros—together with, notably, Mark Zuckerberg—have recast themselves from pasty, delinquent nerds to MMA-fighting, wild-pig-hunting, hypermasculine provocateurs. Trump, in the meantime, has lengthy championed an analogous ethos, starting together with his dismissive and belittling remedy of ladies and lengthening to his disdain of “wokeness” in all its imprecise varieties. Zuckerberg started plotting Meta’s rightward shift after assembly with Trump round Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported. On Friday, CNBC broke the information that Amazon may even roll again its DEI packages.
Already, Meta looks as if a much less welcoming office for its feminine, nonbinary, and trans employees. The firm eliminated tampons from males’s bogs final week, the Times reported. Friday’s modifications additional axed Meta’s chief variety officer, ended various hiring objectives, and deprioritized minority-owned companies when hiring distributors.
Zuckerberg acknowledged to Rogan that DEI packages had been well-intentioned and that ladies, specifically, nonetheless face bias within the office. But efforts to appropriate that, he stated, have gone “a little far.” He didn’t present any particulars on how or whether or not Meta would work to deal with gender disparities sooner or later.
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