Why is Mark Zuckerberg vice-signaling?
The function of Based Zuck
Greetings from Read Max HQ, free of norovirus for nearly one week! This week I had the pleasure of appearing on Van Jackson’s stream/podcast Undiplomatic, which you can listen to here. We discuss many of the things discussed in the newsletter that follows--Mark Zuckerberg’s new look, the right-wing turn in Silicon Valley, and the relationship between the two.
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Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg participated in one of my favorite post-election rituals: Announcing a new direction for Facebook moderation based on his sense of the prevailing new political winds. For 2025, Meta is going to “get back to our roots around free expression” and “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on the platform”:
As John Herrman points out at Intel, this is the third election in a row that’s resulted in an announcement about content moderation; I personally can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2029:
As someone who has been reporting on Meta’s contradictory approaches to censorship and speech since well before they were a matter of national political concern, though, what’s most striking is how familiar this is. In 2016, Zuckerberg wrote a contorted post in response to what he assessed as politicized backlash worth listening to; in 2021, Zuckerberg wrote a contorted post responding to what he assessed as politicized backlash worth listening to. In 2025, he isn’t just doing the same thing — in his video, he recounts how he always does this. His 2016 come-to-Jesus performance was, he suggests, driven by relentless media coverage and government pressure, which he suggests was “clearly political.” He dismissively cites claims about social media’s “threat to democracy” that he once embraced when he banned the sitting president for claiming he’d won an election he didn’t. It’s an effort to disown past decisions and to blame them on motivated critics and outsiders who pressured the company, didn’t really understand or care about Meta’s platforms or users, and led them astray. Now, facing diametric pressures that are also obviously political and relentlessly applied to strategic ends, Meta is saying with surprising bluntness: Now we’ll do this for your team, which, by the way, I’ve always been sympathetic to anyway.
Herrman’s column is a useful corrective to the unfortunate framing that this announcement represents an “unapologetic” Zuck (if anything, the 2025 version is more “apologetic” than its 2021 or 2016 equivalents, just presented in a well-calibrated tone of defiance that casts his previous decisions as coerced). But I do think there’s an important and interesting difference between this video and Zuck’s previous post-election weathervane announcements: The gold chain.
It’s been clear for a while now that Zuckerberg has been Up To Something. Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have described it as the “Zuckaissance”: Over the past eighteen months or so he grew out his hair; he replaced his hoodies with boxy tees; he got really into M.M.A. and wakeboarding. And, yes, he started wearing a gold chain. New Zuck is undeniably less off-putting than old, sweaty-hoodie, Caesar-cut Zuck. But he’s also unmistakably fratty, butch, and (to borrow an overused Twitter phrase) “right-coded,” partaking in the aesthetic and the hobbies of people you would expect to own crypto, listen to mindset podcasts, and vote for Trump (or, at least, refuse to vote for Biden).
It’s not exactly groundbreaking that a rich 40-year-old man has started wearing expensive streetwear. But usually this kind of personal journey culminates in divorce or hilarious/gruesome police body-cam footage or an announcement that you’re moving to Africa for a year, not in a video about new content-moderation guidelines. Zuck seems to have slowly transformed himself into a Dana White hanger-on who dresses like a Kick streamer in order to make to make this post-election right-wing turn seem authentic and deeply felt, rather than merely convenient.
I wouldn’t object if you wanted to conspiracize this--a man with access to incredibly granular, up-to-the-minute data on shifting socio-cultural and political trends makes himself a human Trending Topics module in his mode of dress and choice of hobbies, a reflection of the activity and sentiment rippling across his vast empire--but I also wouldn’t object if you wanted to insist to me that this new makeover reflects an authentic political evolution. Certainly, Zuckerberg would like everyone to think it does; Kevin Roose reports that “several friends and associates of Mr. Zuckerberg’s” have told him that the aesthetic overhaul is accompanied by a genuine change in beliefs: “the billionaire’s personal politics have shifted sharply to the right since 2020, and that his embrace of Mr. Trump may stem less from cynical opportunism than real enthusiasm.”
But the interesting thing to me is less the question of authenticity around Zuck’s evolution and more the public-facing strategy. It would be easy enough, after all, to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago a few times, send a few letters to House Judiciary, and call it a day. Why is Zuck so invested in, effectively, “vice-signaling”? Why is it so important to him to build cultural credibility as a--well, if not a conservative, precisely, then as an “anti-establishment”-coded “classical liberal”? Why is he dressed like that?
One answer, I think, is that Zuck’s new image is as much about a shifting political environment within Silicon Valley as it about the changing winds outside of the industry. A period of tech-industry labor unrest--walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts1--has given way to a “reset” marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns. A looser tech labor market (and a general national atmosphere of reaction) has shifted power back to management, and a highly visible clique of tech workers with quasi-libertarian, open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science politics, clustered on Twitter in communities like “tcot” and “tpot,” has presented executives with the tantalizing (if still ephemeral) prospect of workforce free of Obama-era idealism and political consciousness.
News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context--as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action.2 I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like “legacy media” and “virtue-signaling”--but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do. (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite)
Which leads, I think, to the other important function of Zuck’s new look. I think Roose is right that Zuck is “has clearly been studying Mr. Musk’s playbook”--not just in his rhetorical choices, but in his efforts to become more of a social-media main character in the same manner as Musk. (Note that Zuck is on Threads doing an uncanny imitation of Musk spamming single-emoji responses to Tweets thing.) For most of his career, Zuck has followed the general conventional wisdom around being a C.E.O. and attempted to appear generally nonpartisan (and when partisanship was unavoidable, to express it in the blandest ways possible). But Musk has, over the last few years, demonstrated that there are distinct advantages to aggressive and committed partisanship--specifically, the ability to command and direct swarms of protectors and apologists online.
I suspect that Zuckerberg has noticed this. Since the start of the “techlash,” Zuck and Facebook have been the subject of more aggressive media coverage, and fewer defenders,3 than any other executive or company. (Indeed, hating Facebook has been one of very few cross-partisan American beliefs.) Taking meetings with Republican senators isn’t going to deliver Zuck any worthwhile advocates--but successfully convincing any of the many Twitter and TikTok lapdogs that he’s “based” might earn him a little bit of cover. And if it doesn’t, so what? There’s another election, and another change of heart, just four years away.
As a side note, I think this period is still underemphasized in accounting for the recent reactionary turn of the tech industry executive and investor class. I would guess that internal protests in 2018-2020 did a lot more to push management further to the right than, e.g., Democrats’ rhetorical or regulatory attacks on the industry.
As I mentioned on this podcast with Van Jackson, I think one way of seeing Andreessen’s “American Dynamism” project and the defense-contractor startup coterie in “The Gundo” is as an attempt to create a “new” Silicon Valley free of blue-haired SJWs prone to unionization and direct action.
Except the one guy at TechCrunch with the haircut.
I think you're right on the money here. I was totally unsurprised at the censorship policy changes, but pretty shocked at the detail that they pulled tampons from the men's room at the Meta offices. Zuck's strategy has always struck me as basically "try not to get yelled at as little as possible", but he really seems to be going out of his way to say fuck you to the progressive employee cohort.
On another note: what do you make of his "Elon-ization" and how it squares with the fact that Elon has basically incinerated the traditional business value of Twitter?
My distant impression of Zuckerberg is also that he's one of those nerds who's painfully self-conscious about their own perceived lack of masculinity; it's hard for me not to see all the fighting and grilling and ranching in that light too.