Weather vane Zuckerberg has swung and will swing again

Does anyone remember the Metaverse?

It was Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for giving everyone digital avatars in virtual reality. Basically a bad cover version of Second Life which no-one remembers either.

A measure of its awfulness was when Zuck tried to impress everyone that Meta had invented legs.

He even changed the name of the company to Meta, which was in no way* related to the fact the company named Facebook had been caught out accepting billions of dollars from bad actors trying to influence to 2016 US presidential election.

Zuck was obviously the only person in the world who cared about the Metaverse and the various departments of Facebook Meta tasked with making it work referred themselves unofficially as MMH or Make Mark Happy.

It was eventually Elon Musk who saved Zuckerberg from himself. As Musk was incinerating Twitter, Zuckerberg launched Threads. And in the smartest move he’s made in a decade, Zuckerberg tied Threads to Instagram, which still has some cachet with young people, instead of Facebook, which is now social media for boomers.

Meanwhile, the whole Metaverse folly has been quietly buried.

Now Zuck has had another epiphany. In the Zuckiverse, the result of the 2024 US election – which he seems not to have interfered in this time – means truth is out of style.

With his typical awkwardness, he accused his own fact-checkers of bias in a deadpan echo of Stephen Colbert’s ironic assertion that reality has a liberal bias.

And also, “please don’t crush my business, King Donald.” This is notwithstanding the fact that the incoming president has no legal way to crush Facebook. It would be easier to make the Metaverse happen.

While billionaires act in what they think is their own self-interests and bugger the other people it affects, their interpretation of self-interest varies.

Elon Musk has quite obviously decided it’s in his self-interest to proactively support populist right wing causes. Zuck’s method is to curry favour with whatever he believes to be the dominant paradigm. 

While Musk, like Trump, thrives on bad press, Zuckerberg is clearly terrified of it, while still lacking the social and political skills to know what kind of bad press to care about.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg is a weather vane. I don’t believe his latest pivot to unmoderated speech and MAGA-lite notions of masculinity is the beginning or continuation of a post-truth dystopia. It’s just the current focus of the Make Mark Happy department and will eventually go the way of the Metaverse. 

It might take until the US mid-term elections, but eventually he will post another awkward and out of touch video apologising for the current policy and announcing a new focus on whatever he thinks will make him popular again.

 

 

It’s the spectrum which has shifted

I’ve said for many years that it’s not just the right wing which has slid further to the right, the entire political spectrum has shifted significantly to the right over the last 30 years.

There is ample evidence of this. The fact that anyone can be taken seriously when describing the most token progressive policies of the Biden administration or the Albanese government as not only ‘left wing’ but even ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ proves the words have lost all meaning.

My favourite metric is former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Fraser went from being considered a right wing ogre (or titan, depending on your point of view) in the mid-70s, to being viewed as a bleeding-heart leftie by his own party at the time of his death in 2015. This happened without Fraser ever significantly changing his values or views. It’s just that at the time of his leadership, treating refugees like human beings had bipartisan support.

In the US, Ronald Reagan is treated as a deity of the Republican Party but even Reagan would be too liberal for today’s Republican Party – and Reagan was in no way liberal. Hell, even today’s Democratic Party would think twice, and they had the best Republican candidate of the 21st century in Hillary Clinton. Don’t believe me? She loves Wall St money, she’s never seen a war she didn’t want to join, she campaigned on a platform on manifest destiny, she’s crap with technology… Hillary Clinton is a Republican!

Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing: Mark Zuckerberg is still the socially inept moral vacuum he has always been.

And this brings us to the launch of Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter clone, this week.

There have been numerous Twitter copies, most of which were launched well before Elon Musk’s takeover but they all got quite a boost afterwards. All of them have been fairly forgettable in their own ways. The bulk of them were set up as safe spaces for the hard right, including Parler, Gab, GETTR and Trump’s Truth Social. Others such as Mastodon have no particular agenda beyond freedom from tech giants, and it’s this Fediverse model that both Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky and Zuckerberg’s Threads are based on. 

The problem with all of them is that non-famous social media users have to rebuild their networks from scratch. Zuckerberg’s masterstroke has been in tying Threads to Instagram, which still has youth appeal, instead of Facebook which, let’s be honest, is social media for your mum. Threads does not yet have all the functionality of Twitter but it surely will by the end of the year.

Musk’s destruction of Twitter has been so complete, you would almost think it was deliberate if not for the fact that Musk is not nearly as smart as he or his fanbois think he is.

Virtually every feature of Twitter, which are now considered basic functions, was added in response to how people actually wanted to use the service. It started out as simply a method of sending an SMS to the public. @-replies, hashtags, retweets, photos, videos, quote tweets and threading were all started by Twitter users. The platform responded by making them functional, and killed off third-party services like TwitPic and TwitLonger.

Musk’s biggest mistake in his management of Twitter hasn’t even been letting trolls and misinformation back on the platform in the name of a disingenuous interpretation of free speech. His biggest mistake has been in trying to mandate how members use the service. Every successful website evolves and adapts to its users’ interests. That’s why clickable hashtags have spread to every social media service (except Threads, for now) and you no longer get interminable Farmville requests on Facebook. Musk, like the bore who thinks he knows how to run the education system because he went to school, expects everyone to use Twitter the way he wants to use it.

And that brings us back to the shift of spectrum.

All the trolls and MAGA nuts who worship Musk for taking a hands-off approach to bigotry and misinformation (but an iron-fist approach to criticising him or linking to competing websites) are now acting like Zuckerberg’s Threads is going to take all the remaining sensible people away from Twitter to have their data sucked away by Big Tech.

They seem to have forgotten it was Zuckerberg and Facebook who aided and abetted foreign actors to interfere in the 2016 US Presidential election by spreading [checks notes] misinformation to help their other hero Donald Trump take the White House. Now somehow Zuckerberg has joined the “woke mob.”

Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing: Mark Zuckerberg is still the socially inept moral vacuum he has always been. It’s just that even he can read the room better than Elon Musk. And the market too. There’s no profit in incels thinking you’re cool.

Angry Aussie said it best here:

There is also the valid concern over all the spyware attached to Facebook/Meta’s services. Twitter has less and Mastodon currently has none, but Tik Tok. But if personal privacy is important to you, what are you doing on social media at all? Facebook’s advertising algorithm currently thinks I’m interested in curvy girl sportswear, diva cups, and Goop-esque crystal spoons, so I’m not too bothered that they know too much about me. As for the ads for guitars and sound equipment? Bring it on!

Musk’s biggest shift on Twitter has been to move it away from what the users want to what he would like it to be. In doing do, he has done Zuckerberg a massive favour. It has dragged Zuckerberg away from the metaverse nonsense he’s been obsessed with recently (which was turning him into a joke) and back to giving the people what they want – a microblogging platform which is free to use, you don’t have to rebuild your networks from scratch, you don’t have to wait months for an invitation, and maybe even fewer fascists.

So, I guess, Thanks Elon?