In an effort to seemingly reshape his public image after openly admitting that Facebook worked with the Biden Administration to censor their political opponents, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly hired a Republican strategist and now identifies as a Libertarian, according to a report from the New York Times.
Zuckerberg previously admitted that Facebook worked with the FBI to censor the New York Post’s bombshell story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which outlined business dealings with multiple foreign entities. Facebook, Twitter and other major social media networks worked with the FBI to scrub the story from the internet just weeks before the 2020 Election.
Last month, the tech CEO took things a step further by offering a formal apology for the company’s past censorship policies.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured out teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).
The Meta CEO went on to state that he believes “the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
Now, Zuckerberg has reportedly hired Republican strategist Brian Baker in an effort to improve his image with the right and guide him on his shifting political opinions. The report, citing sources close to Zuckerberg, noted that he has also spoken out against left-wing dogma and more closely aligns with “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism.”
“In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisers, Mr. Zuckerberg has expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington,” the New York Times reported. “He and others at the top of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company”
According to the report, Zuckerberg expressed frustration with blowback towards himself and the company as a whole as a result of his massive involvement with mail-in ballot harvesting in 2020, while attending the Allen and Company conference back in June. He also expressed regret over hiring employees who convinced him to shift to the left on political issues.
“His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all,” the report continued.
In practice, Zuckerberg is seeking to avoid any contact with Washington D.C. unless absolutely necessary. He has also stopped supporting programs that can be interpreted as hyper partisan, and has worked to crack down on employee activism at Meta.
Several sources further told the outlet that Zuckerberg has spoken with former President Donald Trump on more than one occasion over the summer. He has also been “aghast” at the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and wants to firmly back away from “far-left progressivism.”
The New York Times noted that Zuckerberg’s shifting political opinions are “reflective of a larger shift in Silicon Valley, where chief executives have grown frustrated with contentious social issues. Their response has largely been to back away from it.”
