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I really, really don't want to do this, but let's do a bit (just a LITTLE BIT) of fact checking about what Zuck said on the Joe Rogan podcast, because this is something I not only followed closely, but also spent time *talking to the actual people at Meta who dealt with this* which WAS NOT ZUCK.

Anyhoo, he kicks it off with a very bad misunderstanding of the 1st Amendment and the whole "fire in a crowded theater" thing. cc: @kenwhite.bsky.social @jkosseff.bsky.social Not only is this wrong, it's meaningless. He runs a private platform and isn't Congress. Does he not have ANY 1A lawyers?

Then he talks about the administration pressuring them to take down people raising concerns about vaccine side effects. He then says that Meta refused to do this. Which... should be the end of the story. That's what came out in the Murthy case: while admin officials reached out, FB told them no.

And... that's what matters. Because it only violates the law if the gov't engages in *coercive* pressure, which it didn't do here. The gov't tried to persuade the company, the company said no. That's... not unusual. Nor is it a violation of free speech.

But we're already seeing people ignore the "we told them no" part of this, and go into what a massive violation this is. Note that they're not saying anything about Trump admin goons like Brendan Carr now going around issuing *actual* threats, including to Meta about its fact checking program...

The other big part that's getting attention: he talks about Biden admin folks who would call up Meta and "scream and curse" at them. He notes that this is all public *because of the Jim Jordan investigation* and the Murthy lawsuit. But because (unlike Zuck) I actually followed all that, I know...

... that the only documented case of the "cursing" was in an email from Biden admin official Rob Flaherty. The courts made a big deal of him cursing. They paraded an email where he said: "Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today."...

Except that this was totally taken out of context. That email HAD NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with content moderation. Instagram had a glitch that effectively blocked people from following the Biden Insta account. The team apologized, but not clear enough for Flaherty.

But in the lore of the Twitter Files/Murthy case, this email has been the smoking gun of "OMG, the Biden admin cursed out FB officials over content moderation!" You can see the email above though, it has nothing to do with content moderation.

Zuck seems to have been fed *the false narrative* that has circled around the Jim Jordan / Matt Taibbi / Elon Musk circus, *rather than* what *actually happened* at Meta by TALKING TO THE PEOPLE AT META who dealt with these issues.

We shouldn’t be surprised he was just debriefed at Trumps palace. They are all in this together yet all these people can’t see what is really happening. These billionaires don’t care about us, period. They only care about our money.

I'll add that it's HIGHLY unlikely Meta was asked to remove any posts mentioning that the vaccine had side effects, since it obviously does. It would be incredibly poor public messaging. Rather, they may have been asked to take down false claims about side effects, which were common on Insta/FB

I've got a cartoon for that, Mike @mmasnick.bsky.social. By the great Dave Whamond @davewhamond.bsky.social.

actually Dickens wasn't far off the mark, regarding how I feel in this Winter of Our Discontent*... *John Steinbeck, 1961

Yes! So true.

Zuckerberg crying about Biden officials raising their voice at some of his team members about Covid censorship, which never happened, while Trump threatens to jail him for life and close down Meta. Crickets from Zuck on that.

Or just how fucking stupid Zuck is

Not stupid- self serving

Not mutually exclusive. And he's definitely stupid.

Or, part of his conversion to a compliant MAGA supporter. He may know the full story, but if he wants the RW media to believe he's on their side, he needs to validate their emotions about what FB did.