After years of kowtowing to the whims of leftist leaders, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have turned over a new leaf in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
No only did he announce that third-party fact-checkers will be replaced with a “community notes” feature similar to that of Elon Musk’s X, but Meta also backed off from its investment in controversial Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts.
After nuking its biased fact checking operation, Meta is now getting rid of its DEI programs.
You can call this return to sanity the Trump Effect. pic.twitter.com/IZQNJk2SR1
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 10, 2025
The policy shift has been heralded by free-speech advocates, but many on the left are up in arms about Zuckerberg’s apparent ideological realignment.
According to Breitbart:
Business Insider reports that Mark Lemley, a prominent Stanford law professor and lawyer who represented Meta in a high-profile 2023 AI copyright case, has announced that he has dropped the social media giant as a client. Lemley’s decision comes in the wake of recent changes implemented by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which the lawyer describes as a “descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness.”
Lemley, a partner at the law firm Lex Lumina, represented Meta in 2023 when comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors sued the company for allegedly violating copyright by training its Llama AI model on their written works. At the time, Meta’s legal team argued that the claims should fail because the authors could not prove that the AI-generated text closely resembled their original content. The case is still ongoing.
In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Lemley expressed his disappointment with Meta’s direction, stating, “While I think they are on the right side in the generative AI copyright dispute in which I represented them, and I hope they win, I cannot in good conscience serve as their lawyer any longer.” He also announced that he has deactivated his Threads account, as he does not want to “support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe.”
Lemley’s decision was widely panned by social media users:
HA ! HA ! HA!
Bay Area lawyer drops Meta as client over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness’
“I have fired Meta as a client,”
Mark Lemley, who is also a law professor at Stanford University, claimed the Meta boss has embraced “toxic masculinity and… pic.twitter.com/0UQc5hytWm
— Denise (@Likeshesays) January 15, 2025
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is busy building good will with a number of somewhat skeptical conservatives:
What's up with Mark Zuckerberg people ask? What's the saying? If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by 35, you have no brain.
Mark Zuckerberg is literally just growing up with his newer views about free speech and masculinity.
— Luke Lloyd (@LloydBoyLuke) January 13, 2025
Zuckerberg recently called for an injection of masculinity in America’s corporate culture, as The Cut reported:
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered. Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said. “I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
“It’s one thing to say we want to be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that ‘masculinity is bad,’” he added. Later in the episode, Zuckerberg credited martial arts for helping him to redefine his relationship with masculinity, telling Rogan that hanging out with his male friends while they “beat each other” has been a “positive experience.”
Here’s some additional coverage of Zuckerberg’s plans for Meta:
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