The Left has taken its turn hating on Mark Zuckerberg in the past few weeks. Leftists are backing Elizabeth Warren’s push to break up Facebook and its global properties and decrying the self-made billionaire’s recent vocal commitment to promulgating free speech on the platform.
The latest item on their very angry laundry list comes from a Bloomberg story exposing that Zuckerberg made a few hiring recommendations to South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who sparred on the presidential debate stage with Warren just last week.
so buttigieg is attacking elizabeth warren while being advised by mark zuckerberg? ? https://t.co/fgniKrZiaf
— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) October 21, 2019
Zuckerberg is bad, taking his advice is bad, and trying to curry favor with him is bad. It rests incompatibly alongside any separate commitment to revitalizing democracy. https://t.co/8oQnJbJfHk
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) October 21, 2019
During the debate, Buttigieg went after Warren on Medicare For All, a policy he called the “compromise position” in February.
Today, we find out Zuckerberg is his shadow campaign adviser. Warren wants to break up Facebook.
He tried to draw a contrast with her. He damn sure has.
— Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) October 21, 2019
So, Zuckerberg has been advising Mayor Pete and Tulsi is tweeting out support by Tucker Carlson. They were such obvious plants that they might as well have tattooed “69” on their faces.
— Zito (@_Zeets) October 21, 2019
Except Zuck’s not actually “advising” Buttigieg any more than LinkedIn is.
Buttigieg and Zuckerberg overlapped at Harvard, where the former graduated magna cum laude the same year that the latter launched Facebook and then dropped out of school altogether. The 2020 contender was one of the first 300 people to join the social network. Recall that “The Facebook” began by exclusively allowing top-tier dot-edu email addresses, starting with Harvard. And Zuckerberg live-streamed a tour of South Bend back in 2017.
So if they’re friends, who cares? Zuckerberg has held fundraisers for Republican Chris Christie and Democrat Cory Booker, naming his interest in both politicians’s support for charter schools. He’s been a vocal supporter of gay rights causes and critical of President Trump. It’s no wonder that as a socially progressive but entrepreneur-minded job creator a candidate like Buttigieg would appeal to him on both a political and personal level.
And for all the left-wing outrage over the meeting, let’s not forget that not only did Sheryl Sandberg endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016 to the glee of feminists across the country, but the Facebook COO was on both Clinton’s shortlists for secretary of two departments — Treasury and Commerce. Facebook has long maintained that it wants its platform to prove nonpartisan, not its personnel.
Furthermore, it doesn’t actually look like Zuckerberg did anything more than throw a few resumes Buttigieg’s way, per the request of Facebook staffers who wanted in on his campaign. If anything, that’s more of a favor for a few quality employees than for a top-tier presidential candidate.
