A lawyer representing Meta in a copyright case said he was dropping the company as a client due to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity.”
The move comes as employees and associates of the social media company grapple with their founder’s apparent attempts to pivot rightward before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week.
Mark Lemley, a partner at law firm Lex Lumina PLLC and director of Stanford Law School’s Program in Law, Science & Technology said he was firing the social media giant as a client in a social media post on Monday.
Lemley was previously defending Meta in an ongoing copyright infringement case filed by writers including novelist Richard Kadrey and comedian Sarah Silverman, who claim the company trained their generative AI model Llama using their copyrighted works obtained through piracy websites.
“While I think they are on the right side in the generative AI copyright dispute in which I represented them, and I hope they win, I cannot in good conscience serve as their lawyer any longer,” Lemley said in a post on LinkedIn on Monday evening. Federal court records show that Lemley was taken off the lawsuit as a lawyer representing the defense that same day.
Lemley also said he was not planning to delete his Facebook account, but would stop buying things from ads on Meta’s sites and would abandon his Threads account in favor of Bluesky—which he called “an outstanding alternative to Twitter.”
“The last thing I need is to support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe,” he added.
Neither Lemley nor Meta immediately returned requests for comment from the Daily Beast.
Lemley is not the only Meta associate frustrated with Zuckerberg’s recent changes. Michael McConnell, the co-chair of the company’s Oversight Board, said in an interview with NPR last week that it appeared like the company was “buckling to political pressure.”
McConnell voiced some light praise for Zuckerberg’s attempts to reform the company’s fact checking program, but criticized the way it was rolled out.
“I would have liked to have seen these reforms laid out… in less contentious and partisan times so that they would be considered on the merits rather than looking like this is you know, Donald Trump is president, and now they’re caving.”
