This week, billionaire podcaster Joe Rogan posted a three-hour interview with billionaire Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The interview was surprising because it was unannounced and because the two seemed out of sync. Rogen is generally seen as an anti-establishment guy, while Zuckerberg is seen as a smart robot chicken.
On social media after the interview was published, many Rogan fans insisted that Rogan was awesome. Several tweets called Zuckerberg a "reptile," a more or less deliberate reference to anti-Semitic memes. But the truth is that most conversations were low-key and friendly.
This shouldn't be a surprise. Underneath the brand differences, Rogen and Zuckerberg are practically the same person. They are both very wealthy white men in the communications industry. They have similar interests and similar perspectives. And both are deeply convinced that they deserve their positions of power and influence, and that if something goes wrong on the internet or in our political culture, it's someone else's fault.
In fact, listening to their conversation, it quickly becomes clear that Rosen and Zuckerberg have a lot in common. They talk at length, of course, about Zuckerberg's new VR projects, since that's what they're there to promote. From there they move on to virtual games (they shared a virtual fencing match) and then to non-virtual games.
Rogan began his career as a mixed martial arts (MMA) commentator, and Zuckerberg is now an enthusiast. The biggest disagreement between the two is when Rogan strongly insists that to get better at MMA, you have to train as much as you can for grappling. It looks like Zuckerberg doesn't want Rogan's advice on his training regimen and takes the conversation further.
The part of the conversation that has received the most attention is the discussion of online misinformation. Rogan asked Zuckerberg about Facebook's decision to downplay the New York Post article in 2020, per FBI guidelines. The article reported on a laptop that allegedly contained incriminating information from and about Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.
The story continues.
Republican Party supporters have long been obsessed with history. Trump hoped the Hunter revelations would influence his choice. He tried to blackmail Ukraine into investigating Biden's son, threatening to cut off military supplies. This led to his dismissal.
The right sees Zuckerberg's revelation as a major admission of wrongdoing. In fact, however, as international relations professor Nicholas Grossman explained on Twitter, Zuckerberg said nothing new or criminal.
Zuckerberg admitted (as he has before) that he could be wrong: the Post article was confirmed by other sources. But, as The Washington Post points out, there was reason for caution, given Trump's 2016 misinformation and clearly corrupt efforts to interfere.
What is most evident in the misinformation debate is that neither Rosen nor Zuckerberg are prone to finding their worst moments to mislead their audiences.
Rogan is making a lot of noise about the dangers of deleting information. The subtext here is that he himself has been widely criticized for spreading extremely dangerous and dangerous lies about the Covid pandemic. He had guests promoting ivermectin, a covid treatment that didn't work. It is also home to a widely discredited vaccine denier and conspiracy theorist who claims the pandemic was "planned".
"I really admire your work, that you're really committed to giving voice to so many people," Zuckerberg said during the podcast, referring to Rosen. It's one way of looking at what Rogan does.
The second less charitable decision, made in allowing him to use his platform to spread misinformation about vaccines to his audience of 11 million, is that Rogan is an ignorant jerk with no editorial standards and little accountability. platform ie. He clearly can't handle it.
As bad as Rogan is, Facebook has made the situation much worse. A knowledgeable interviewer wouldn't have touched on Facebook's disinformation debate about Hunter Biden. It reportedly focused on Facebook's role in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.
In August 2017, Myanmar authorities launched a program of mass murder, rape and arson in an attempt to force Rohingya Muslims out of the country.
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