The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg Lies to Joe Rogan’s Face’ ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, for the Verge, listened to Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast so none of us need to. Lopatto does a good job in this article of walking through some of the claims made by Zuckerberg and the conspicuous things he omits. It is a good piece.

However, there is one paragraph for which I call for a correction. Zuckerberg spent considerable time complaining about Apple in ways well beyond the scope of his corporate interests. He whined about blue iMessage bubbles! But he does have more legitimate and relevant disputes, too.

Lopatto:

At least some of these Apple issues actually matter — there is a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the important one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in newspaper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is generally no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.

The 2018 Safari changes might have been what started Zuckerberg’s grudge, but they were not the trigger for Meta’s newspaper complaints or the multibillion-dollar cost to ad-supported social media companies. That was, of course, App Tracking Transparency, announced in 2020 and launched the following year.