Mark of the Beastly

Zuckerberg writes a love letter to the House GOP star chamber.

Mark Zuckerberg, during an interview at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on July 18, 2024.

Hard to type when your hands are shaking. There are so many odious creeps in our face these days — Trump, JD Vance, Nancy Mace, Steven Cheung, Ann Coulter, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel — I’d almost put out of my mind how Mark Zuckerberg is the most dangerous and obscenely amoral of all.

I mean, he’s abetted the Russians in contaminating the 2016 presidential election, reneged on almost every promise he ever made to his users and his customers, repeatedly violated rules on data retention and intentionally — in full public view having announced his research to the world — addicted users, adults and children alike to his platforms and served them psychologically lethal doses of poison. All for money. Money money money money money.

Now he’s facing an administration that’s on to him, that hasn’t been suckered by any of his biennial public apologies for the latest horrendous act of misfeasance or malfeasance or scumfeasance or whatever. While Covid still raged, they asked him repeatedly to filter the most dangerous Covid and vaccine misinformation and disinformation from his sites. This was a big ask, because every click on propaganda about ivermectin or conspiracy theories about Bill Gates planting nanochips in your body made Mark Zuckerberg money. And you know Meta’s slogan, “If it’s profitable, we’ll do it. No matter who is harmed! So fuck you!”

As far as we know, from what has been reported to date, the administration put the arm on him without threatening him or promising anything in return. Maybe he interpreted the requests as “Lina Khan’s FTC is going to be up your ass like a sigmoidoscope,” but after months of excuses he finally followed through, saving who-knows-how-many lives — just not the ones who died after believing the garbage he was hosting. (Fun fact: One of the “Disinformation Dozen” on Covid, according to an internet audit by the Center for Counting Digital Hate, was noted brain-worm patient, bear-corpse mover and whale decapitator Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the latest poster lunatic for the Trump-Vance campaign.)

So why eat crow now? Aha! It happens that House GOP committee chairs James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have almost run out of phantoms to chase in their zeal to pin something, anything, on the Biden Administration. And simultaneously, Zuckerberg will do something, anything, to prevent the House from passing the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act and the Kids Online Safety Act. Off that, he should suddenly confess to “censoring” content under White House duress.

“In 2021,” he wrote to Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan this week, “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”

Gag me with a loon. To curry political favor from the very House Republicans who can bury online-protect bills, Zuckerberg is doing to those delusional zealots exactly what he’s done to gullible users of his platform for years: feeding them lies that they will swallow like candy.

The truth is that what he’s confessing to is something publishers and platforms have done forever: gatekeeping to protect readers and his own brands' reputation and credibility. That is not censorship; it is discretion.

Zuckerberg claims the pressure on Facebook constituted de facto government censorship and (whaddya know!) apologizes for caving. But what he should apologize for is his dilatory half measures while reckless users were playing Russian roulette with the bogus ravings of RFK Jr. and others.

Of course, that wouldn’t suit his current MAGA sycophancy tour on rightwing media outlets, where he recently praised Trump for his “badass” response to the Butler, Pa.-rally attempt on his life. And where he plays into Republican accusations of social-media bias against Conservatives and the machinations of Marxist extremists.

Or did I misread his statement?

“I believe the government pressure was wrong,” he wrote, “and I regret we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

He thinks he’s a visionary tycoon, but he’s more like a sex worker. “What do you like, Jim? Do you like this?”

The whole repugnant stunt puts me in mind of that old movie Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Because, no doubt, he did.