(1) WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 09: Kara Swisher moderates a conversation with Jen Psaki about her book "Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World" at Sixth & I Synagogue on May 09, 2024 in Washington, DC.
(2) UNITED STATES - JANUARY 31: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is sworn in to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis," in Dirksen building on Wednesday, January 31, 2024.
Lesbian journalist Kara Swisher, an expert on the technology industry, is roasting Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over his kowtowing to Donald Trump — and blaming former colleague Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook’s inclusivity program.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
In a post on Threads, Swisher said she had texted Sandberg “to ask her to speak up about the weird ‘masculine energy’ and ‘corporate neutering’ crap that [Zuckerberg] is now peddling in his self interest to curry favor with the Trump administration. I had heard from sources that he had specifically blamed her in a meeting. It was grostesque and I hoped she would say something, but crickets. So I will: Mark was, as I noted in my memoir, the most dangerous person in the tech world who did not know it. He knows it now.”
Swisher shared a paragraph from a New York Times article about Zuckerberg’s meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago November 27. “Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting,” the paragraph reads. “He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.”
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and more, announced recently that it is ending fact-checking on its platforms, allowing content that had been banned — including anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech — and scrapping its diversity, equity, and inclusion program, along with making layoffs. Trump aide Stephen Miller had told Zuckerberg that the incoming president would work against DEI programs, according to the Times story.
Zuckerberg promised to “do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda,” the Times reports. Meta and Miller declined to comment for the article, which quoted anonymous sources, while a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team “declined to address a majority of the reporting,” the story notes.
“What Mark is doing now to trash [Sandberg’s] legacy completely — he had also previously blamed her for all manner of shitty actions that were entirely his doing — is heinous,” Swisher wrote on Threads. “He is a small little creature with a shriveled soul to do this to someone who was a key part of making him so rich & powerful. The fact is he is not a man but a pathetic factotum, getting his orders from the likes of Stephen Miller. While she is not without blame for the many problems at Facebook, this is a massive betrayal. Ugh.”
If Kamala Harris had won the election, Swisher added, “Mark would be asking us to use they/them as his pronouns and getting a ‘Swiftie’ tattoo. He is … the human equivalent of a really awful chameleon.”
