Mark Zuckerberg Doubles Down on the MAGAfication of Meta

The MAGAfication of Facebook continued apace this weekend, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a slate of additional changes meant to appease President-elect Donald Trump before jetting down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with him again.

In addition to axing his company’s fact-checking program, rolling back content moderation, and elevating Republican executives and board members—all moves that Zuckerberg made last week—Meta will also end its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, launched to address the dearth of women, Black, and Hispanic workers in the tech industry.

But Zuckerberg, in a Friday appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, essentially argued that those programs have worked too well. “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 said. “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 claim coming from the CEO of a company where men outnumber women by almost two to one: In 2022, the most recent year of Meta’s reported employee data, only 37% of its workers were female—a figure that hasn’t budged since Meta began reporting it five years earlier. The same is true of Silicon Valley as a whole, where women, Black, and Hispanic workers remain dramatically underrepresented despite years of (more or less sincere) corporate diversity efforts. Just last September, a new analysis by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that women in tech made zero representation gains over the past generation.

What has changed, however, is the mood in both Washington and San Francisco. An ascendant strain of swaggering, “anti-woke” thinking has lately infected Silicon Valley, where a series of high-profile tech bros—including, notably, Mark Zuckerberg—have recast themselves from pasty, antisocial nerds to MMA-fighting, wild-pig-hunting, hypermasculine provocateurs. Trump, meanwhile, has long championed a similar ethos, beginning with his dismissive and belittling treatment of women and extending to his disdain of “wokeness” in all its vague forms. Zuckerberg began plotting Meta’s rightward shift after meeting with Trump around Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported. On Friday, CNBC broke the news that Amazon will also roll back its DEI programs.

Already, Meta seems like a less welcoming workplace for its female, nonbinary, and trans workers. The company removed tampons from men’s bathrooms last week, the Times reported. Friday’s changes further axed Meta’s chief diversity officer, ended diverse hiring goals, and deprioritized minority-owned businesses when hiring vendors.

Zuckerberg acknowledged to Rogan that DEI programs were well-intentioned and that women, in particular, still face bias in the workplace. But efforts to correct that, he said, have gone “a little far.” He didn’t provide any details on how or whether Meta would work to address gender disparities in the future.