Lawyer and Stanford professor Mark Lemley said he’s dropping Meta as a client over what he said was the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness.”
Lemley shared his harsh words and reasoning in a Bluesky thread and on LinkedIn on Monday.
His decision came after Zuckerberg said last week that Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — would end its third-party fact checking operation in favor of a feature similar to Community Notes on X. Zuckerberg said the move was about “restoring free expression” on Facebook and Instagram, where he said his fact checkers had made “too many mistakes” in recent years.
Meta also announced last week it would be ending its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Those big changes did not sit well with Lemley, who was one of the attorneys representing the company in a lawsuit over its alleged use of copyrighted texts to train its artificial intelligence tools.
“I have fired Meta as a client. While I think they are on the right side in the generative AI copyright dispute in which I represented them, and I hope they win, I cannot in good conscience serve as their lawyer any longer,” he wrote.
Still, Lemley said he is not willing to delete his Facebook profile. “While I have thought about quitting Facebook, I find great value in the connections and friends I have here, and it doesn’t seem fair that I should lose that,” he explained.
Instead, Lemley said he will be deactivating his Threads account, the X-like platform that is owned by Meta. “Bluesky is an outstanding alternative to Twitter, and the last thing I need is to support a Twitter-like site run by a [Elon] Musk wannabe,” he noted.
The attorney also said he will hold off on buying anything from ads he sees on Facebook and Instagram moving forward.
Lemley’s claim that Zuckerberg and his company are leaning into “Neo-Nazi madness” is a particularly loaded phrase, considering Zuckerberg is Jewish and has posted about celebrating Jewish holidays in the past. The 40-year-old CEO and his wife, Priscilla Chan, also donated $1.3 million to Jewish organizations in 2021.
Up next, Zuckerberg will join Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
For more insight into Meta’s recent changes to its fact checking operation, click here.
