It's a new year and a new Mark Zuckerberg, the meta CEO, continuing to cozy up to President-elect Trump's new administration.

This time in an interview with Joe Rogan, but not everyone is buying the MAGA makeover.

Deirdre Bosa digging into whether the strategy could backfire Deirdre in today's tech check.

Hey, Sarah, yeah. So Zuckerberg's critics, some of them calling his turn opportunistic, disingenuous, spineless even, because for all of his recent comments and actions to appeal to a more libertarian or conservative audience, there are past efforts and actions in the other direction, like the promotion of progressive values on his platforms and within his own company.

There's also been stricter content moderation policies during the 2020 presidential election.

Now, shortly after Zuckerberg's latest Joe Rogan interview published on Friday,

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney posted on X, after years of pretending to be Democrats, big tech leaders,

are now pretending to be Republicans. Be aware of the

scummy monopoly campaign, he says. Now, Sweeney has long hit out against big tech's dominance,

especially as Epic Games. This is the company behind Fortnite, especially as it's locked in a legal

battle with Apple over its app store policies which restrict Epic's ability to earn more money on the

platform. This is really something that Sweeney and Zuckerberg have been aligned on. So it was

interesting for him to come out and slam all of big tech in the wake of Zuckerberg's

Rogan interview. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg's comments slamming Apple for not inventing anything new

since the iPhone, that had users calling him out for buying Instagram and WhatsApp and making copycats of Snap and Twitter.

His own following has also been skeptical of his new ideals with one of the most like comments in his Instagram post last week, detailing meta's new fact-checking and moderation policies.

It reads, you're just an opportunist. You just switch to the winning side. And indeed, guys,

there have been other tech leaders that have been far more outspoken on these sort of MAGA ideals

long before it was trendy or convenient. A few names that come to mind, Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong,

substacks, Chris Best, Andrels,

Palmer Lucky, and Palantiers, Alex Karp.

This is a fact perhaps not lost on the president-elect himself.

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