On January 10th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan and put on quite a performance. He talked about how the Biden administration had pressured Meta to take down content.
As I wrote at the time, the whole Rogan interview was an exercise in misdirection. The “pressure” Zuck kept describing was the kind of thing the Supreme Court explicitly found, in the Murthy case, was standard-issue government communication — the kind of thing Justice Kagan said happens “literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.” The Court called the lower court’s findings of “censorship” clearly erroneous. And Zuck himself kept admitting, over and over, that Meta’s response to the Biden administration was to tell them no.
On February 3rd, Zuckerberg texted Elon Musk:
Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.
So the man who spent three hours performing righteous indignation about government censorship proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.
And Zuck’s framing of “doxxing” is doing a lot of work here. The DOGE staffers whose identities were being shared on social media were federal employees exercising enormous government power — canceling grants, accessing sensitive government databases, making decisions that affected millions of Americans. The administration went to great lengths to hide who these people were, precisely because what they were doing was controversial and, in many cases, potentially illegal. Identifying who is wielding government power on your behalf has a name, and that name is accountability, not “doxxing.”
Notably, the Zuckerberg text came the day after Wired started naming DOGE bros. Which is reporting. Not doxxing. Doxxing is revealing private info, such as an address. A federal employee’s name is not private info. It’s just journalism.
Also notice how Zuckerberg bundles “doxxing or threatening” — conflating two very different things. Removing credible threats of violence is something every platform already does; it’s in every terms of service. But by packaging the identification of public servants alongside actual threats, Zuck makes the whole thing sound like a routine trust-and-safety operation rather than what it actually was: volunteering to help the government hide its own employees from public scrutiny.
It’s also worth noting the broader context of the relationship here. These two were, at least publicly, supposed to be rivals. Remember the whole cage match fiasco? The very public trash-talking? And yet here’s Zuck texting Musk late at night, opening with flattery (“Looks like DOGE is making progress”), offering content suppression as a gift, and then — in literally the next breath in the text exchange — Musk pivots to asking Zuck if he wants to join a bid to buy OpenAI’s intellectual property.
This has nothing to do with free expression. It’s about power. Who has it, who Zuckerberg thinks he needs to stay on the right side of, and who he thinks he can safely perform outrage against. The Biden administration was on its way out the door when Zuck did the Rogan interview, making them a perfectly safe target for his “never again” act.
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