In an hour-long interview with the host of the popular podcast Acquired, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave one of the most revealing interviews of his career. In the interview, Zuckerberg talked about the biggest mistake of his career, and also announced that he has stopped apologizing. Is this part of the rebranded Zuckerberg? Maybe. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of the human side of the Meta CEO. He’s been actively sharing with the world what he does in his private time. We know he’s been raising Wagyu and Angus cattle at his Ko’olau Ranch on Kauai, we know he loves to surf and he recently competed in his first jiu-jitsu tournament and won multiple medals. Zuckerberg 2.0 also looks different with his bouncy curls, oversized t-shirts and “epic” new gold chain. And now we know one more thing about the Facebook co-founder, his apology days are over.

Mark Zuckerberg says the biggest mistake of his career was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake”. This was possibly a sign of the political fallout following the 2016 US election, where Facebook was widely blamed for its role in spreading misinformation. Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of Facebook user data, as well as foreign actors leveraging the platform to influence voters, cast a shadow over the company. But Zuckerberg believes he took too much responsibility for problems that he believed were not entirely Facebook’s fault. He stressed that, in retrospect, Facebook should have shown more understanding about the issues it accepted responsibility for.

“One of the things that I look back on and regret is that I think we accepted other people’s view of certain things that they were claiming we were doing wrong, or that we were responsible for, when I don’t think we really were responsible. There were a lot of things that we messed up and that we needed to fix. But I think there’s an approach where, when you’re a company and somebody says there’s a problem … the right instinct is to take responsibility. Say, maybe it’s not entirely our job, but we’re going to fully own the problem, we’re going to take responsibility, we’re going to fix it,” he said during the interview.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that many criticisms of Facebook were valid, while others were driven by political agendas. The tech industry and social media were blamed for societal problems that were beyond their control. He pointed out that Facebook tended to accept responsibility and commit to fixing perceived problems, but this led to even more blame.

“When it’s a political problem… sometimes there are people who are acting in good faith, who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are also people who are just looking for someone to blame. And if your approach is “I’m going to take responsibility for all of these things” — people are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all of these things in society — if we’re saying, we’re actually going to do our part to fix this stuff, I think there were a lot of people who took that and were like, oh, you’re taking responsibility for this? I think, I’ll kick you to more things,” Zuckerberg said.

Looking back, Zuckerberg regrets not being clear about the boundaries of Facebook’s responsibility. He believes the company could have responded more vigorously to unfounded allegations, and that it may take another decade to fully repair the company’s damaged reputation. However, the Meta CEO says he has now found the right balance on political issues.

During this period of mistakes, Facebook invested heavily in content moderation and policy reforms, including the establishment of an Oversight Board – a bold, albeit imperfect, solution. Despite these efforts, Facebook continues to struggle with distrust from both users and governments. However, despite existing doubts about privacy on the platform, its services are used by billions of users worldwide.