Watch Mark Zuckerberg duck a question about including Breitbart in Facebook’s News tab

Mark Zuckerberg is a goddamn coward. 

Speaking today at a “fireside chat” with News Corp CEO Robert Thomson to promote the launch of the platform’s News tab, Zuckerberg completely side-stepped a legitimate question about the controversial decision to allow far-right tire fire Breitbart to be a partner. 

When Marc Tracy of the New York Times asked Zuckerberg about this decision, Zuckerberg nearly sprained his ankles jumping out of the way, refusing to even directly acknowledge Breitbart and then bloviating the usual garbage about “a diversity of views.”

Here’s video of the exchange. 

In case you need Zuckerberg’s act of pure cowardice in writing, he says, “I don’t know if I’m going to speak to any specific firm in there, but the standards are transparent, like I just said. I do think that part of having this be a trusted source is, it needs to have a diversity of, basically, views in there. I think you want to have content that kind of represents different perspectives but is doing so in a way that complies with the standards with have for this.”

He goes on to add, “I certainly think you want to include a breadth of content in there to make sure all the different topics can be covered.” 

Keep in mind that Breitbart has done stupid things ranging from the trivial — confusing an international soccer star for a gang member moving migrants via jet skis — to the truly heinous, including the way it stoked racist, anti-immigration fears in reporting the story of an assault of a child in Twin Falls, Idaho. 

Even Wikipedia has gone so far as to label Breitbart “fake news.”

Yet that isn’t good enough for Zuckerberg, who’s recently been wining and dining high-profile conservative pundits over their cries of being censored. Breitbart (and Fox News, which has peddled its own conspiracy theories) will be part of the News tab alongside The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. 

Zuckerberg and Facebook have stressed that there were will be standards in all of this, that real human beings will be involved in fact-checking and curating, and that the whole thing will “evolve” over time. 

But by allowing Breitbart to be a part of this in the first place, Zuckerberg is immediately undermining any legitimacy the entire project has. Breitbart and its racist fear-mongering were spread, particularly during the 2016 campaign, via Facebook. 

While Zuckerberg has promised to put up safeguards ahead of the 2020 elections to prevent foreign interference via Russia from happening again, he seems content to let the home-grown interference and fake news continue to spread like wildfire. 

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just letting the fox into the hen house, he’s leaving a nice bottle of wine for the fox to enjoy with his dinner.