"Morning Joe" hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough (Photo: Screen capture)
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made it clear that they don't buy Meta's decision to take the "No Kings" account offline amid the nationwide protests over the weekend.
Saturday marked the latest protest, and amid all the videos of huge rallies around the country, the main account went dark. Meta tried to come up with an excuse that it saw an increase in activity that it thought was unusual, evidently not knowing that there were millions of Americans marching in the streets.
"Come on, man," Scarborough said as Brzezinski read Meta's statement, which claimed it suspected "bots" were involved.
"Did anyone see how many people were in the streets? Were those bots?" asked Brzezinski.
Scarborough asked whether Meta would have done that to President Donald Trump's account. During the Jan. 6 attack, none of the Trump accounts were taken down. They were only taken down after the fact. In fact, Trump's social media posts were used as part of evidence in the congressional hearings to help craft a timeline.
"I mean, come on, how stupid does he think we are?" asked Scarborough.
The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire noted how Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg specifically has cozied up to Trump in the second term.
"We, of course, saw Zuckerberg and other tech titans, Elon Musk included, you know, on the dais with Trump there," said Lemire. "And after his inauguration with better seats in the events, frankly, than a number of the governors in the Republican Party. We should note the they say — claim, there was influence besides web traffic. And our later engineers recognized the account should not have been taken offline."
"Uh-huh," Brzezinski said with disbelief.
"Please..." echoed Scarborough,
"This is what Matt is saying, but still, it took even more time to restore access. Meta issued what they call a sincere apology for the error. But I mean, guys, you know, I mean, I think we are right to be skeptical of this," Lemire continued.
"Come on," Scarborough said.
"So let me get this right," Brzezinski jumped in. "Meta does that and Starlink turns it down on Ukraine. I'm just kinda — it doesn't smell right, does it?"
"Well, Gene, we have plutocrats that are actually controlling our media. We have plutocrats that are controlled media. And we have allowed a South African who, for some reason, people were afraid to call what looked like a Nazi salute, a Nazi salute. Who does that several times, who is constantly putting outrageous, crazy things out there, who has a ketamine, or at least had a very bad ketamine habit, where we have him in a position where he has control over America's national security system. And of course, they all cozied up to Donald Trump and are playing ball with him in the most destructive ways possible."
Gene Robinson noted that Musk has spent around $300 million on the 2026 midterm election to help Republicans.
"We have a situation where this handful of really absurdly wealthy men have this ridiculous control over what's supposed to be a democracy," Robinson said. "And we're pretending that that's okay. That's not the way this is supposed to work or not the way I thought this was supposed to work. But there you have it. So you have to go to Elon Musk for our national security concerns. You have to go to Mark Zuckerberg for our First Amendment rights to free expression. And they have say, over what the — I thought — the Constitution had say over."
Scarborough, a former Republican and avowed capitalist, blasted the "insanely small number of billionaires who are in charge of our media. Like whether you're looking at Meta, whether you're looking at now, Paramount, CBS, CNN, go down the list. An insanely small number of tech billionaires in charge of probably the single most significant technological advance and most dangerous technological advance at the same time of our lifetime in artificial intelligence."
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