Good morning! Trump's Cabinet picks head into confirmation hearings, FTC chair Lina Khan shares reflections, and Mark Zuckerberg brings Meta into its "masculine" era.
- Masculinity at Meta. Donald Trump is set to take office next week, and if anyone's prepared, it's Meta, which spent the past week announcing a sweeping set of policy changes that seem to ready the tech and social media giant for Trump 2.0.
It all started on Jan. 7, when Meta announced the end of its third-party fact-checking program and overarching changes to its speech policies, which were quietly executed by a secretive, small team within the $135 billion company. Less "censorship," as Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in a video, allows Facebook and Instagram users to call LGBTQ people "mentally ill," describe women as "household objects" and otherwise demean groups that have become politicized by the right, like transgender people. Former U.K. deputy prime minister and Meta global affairs head Nick Clegg was replaced by Joel Kaplan, Zuckerberg's longtime emissary to the American right, whose name was on Meta's blog post announcing these changes.
