Nearly a year ago, at UFC 298 inside Anaheim’s Honda Center, featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski walked into the arena to the sound of Men at Work’s 1981 classic “Down Under” with an unexpected guest at his side.
Alongside his trainers and medical techs, Volkanovski had in his corner Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., dressed in the same black sweat suit as the rest of the team, his head bobbing to the music. For the tech mogul, whose net worth is above $200 billion, it was a public welcome to the favored sport of president-elect Donald Trump.
“No matter how much money you have, no matter what you have in life, it is one of those very unique and amazing things if you get the opportunity to do it,” UFC CEO Dana White said of Zuckerberg walking out with the Australian champ. “This guy loves this sport. He is super passionate about it. When you get into this sport, it is fucking fascinating the way this pulls you in.”
On Jan. 6, Zuckerberg returned the favor, naming White to Meta’s board of directors in a move that he said he had been “working on for a while.”
In fact, the addition of White was one of a number of eyebrow-raising moves Zuckerberg has made in January, all of which appear destined to improve the relationship his company has with the Trump administration — with an FTC antitrust case set to begin this year.
First, Meta shook up its public policy team, removing former U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who had been leading public affairs since 2018, and replacing him with Facebook veteran Joel Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush with deep Republican ties in D.C.
Then, on Jan. 7, Zuckerberg unveiled a sweeping overhaul of Meta’s content moderation strategy, eliminating its fact-checking operation and greatly reducing its content moderation outside of extreme examples like terrorism.
Zuckerberg lamented the pressure by governments and “legacy media” to push for censorship and said that the “fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
And he said that he was “going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Rogan (himself a UFC color commentator) posted Friday Jan. 10, Zuckerberg compared the fact-checking situation t the book 1984, arguing that the system they put in place was doing more harm than good.
“It just got to a point where it’s just, ‘this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program.’ And I guess it was probably about a few years until I really started coming to the conclusion that we were going to need to change something about that.”
He said that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the U.K. Brexit vote were turning points: “I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time, we just faced this massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds,” he said.
Also on Jan. 10, Janelle Gale, VP of human resources for Meta, sent an email to staffers outlining how the company will largely be ending its diversity, inclusion and equity efforts. “The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI,” read the memo obtained by Axios. “The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
In his conversation with Rogan, Zuckerberg said that he thinks “a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” and that corporate America was trying to get away from a certain type of “masculine energy.”
“I think having a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive,” he added, while acknowledging that it may not be as appealing to women. “I do think that if you’re a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it’s too masculine … there isn’t enough of the kind of energy that you may naturally have.
“And it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you, and that’s not good either, because you want women to be able to succeed and have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people, no matter in what their background or gender,” he added.
It all adds up to something of a right turn for Zuckerberg, who initially created the fact-checking program in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. His pivot comes amid something of a turning point for media as a whole. At Trump’s Election Night celebration at Mar-a-Lago, White introduced the president-elect, thanking a slew of podcasters who hosted Trump for interviews (including Joe Rogan) in a not-so-subtle jab at the “legacy media.”
In the interview with Rogan, Zuckerberg expanded on the decision, telling the podcast host that he thinks White will help Meta push back on public pressure it is facing.
“Part of the conversation that I had with him around joining our board was like, we have a lot of governments and folks around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company. And we need some strong people who are going to basically help advise us on how to handle some of these situations,” Zuckerberg said.
“I’ve never been interested in joining a board of directors until I got the offer to join Meta’s board,” White said in connection with his new role. “I am a huge believer that social media and AI are the future.”
It’s a belief that Zuckerberg shares. And he senses an opportunity to keep it that way with his series of strategic maneuvers that could keep Meta out of the government crosshairs — and perhaps get some protection from Trump in its overseas business, too.
And just like Volkanovski, he is ready to go to the mat to stay on top.
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