The first three posts in Stanford law professor Mark Lemley’s four-post Bluesky thread on his feelings about Meta’s Trumpist makeover could have been anyone talking.
He was struggling with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness”, he wrote. While he thought about quitting the Meta-owned social media app, he still saw “great value” in the connections and friends he had on it, and it didn’t seem fair that he should lose it.
But though he decided to stay on Facebook, he will be deactivating his Threads account, he added. The app, which Meta launched in 2023 as a competitor to Elon Musk’s deteriorating Twitter (now X), just isn’t necessary was his conclusion: “Bluesky is an outstanding alternative to Twitter, and the last thing I need is to support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe.”
This, plus an additional declaration that he will not purchase directly from adverts he sees on Facebook or Instagram, still seemed like the standard thinking-out-loud any Meta user could have done after Zuckerberg’s embrace of “masculine energy”, his rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) workplace policies and his gutting of US content moderation to adapt to the anything-goes Trump era.
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The punchline came in the fourth post: “I have fired Meta as a client.”
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Lemley had been among the lawyers representing the company in a high-profile AI copyright case since 2023, acting on its behalf as plaintiffs including comedian Sarah Silverman, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and other authors sued it for training its generative AI systems on copyrighted books.
Lemley — who represented Meta through his role as a partner in Lex Lumina, a firm largely comprising other academics — still thinks Meta is “on the right side” of the dispute and hopes it will win the case. But it will do so without his help as he “cannot in good conscience serve as their lawyer any longer”.
Meta, for sure, won’t be shy of lawyers, for this or any other case. Still, Lemley’s principled stance is a reminder that not everybody has to go along with Zuckerberg’s new direction — and not everybody will. The Facebook founder may have gained new friends, but he has been unfriended, too.
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