Mark Zuckerberg sightings are a rare occurrence these days. He hardly does media interviews after being torn to shreds by nearly every publication on the planet. Ironically, he rarely goes on social media, as the comments people leave on his posts are almost always negative, accusing him of things like being a lizard person who has come here to destroy civilization (could be true). He doesn’t do podcasts, after he made a fool of himself by defending Holocaust deniers. He rarely speaks at conferences after he mistakenly declared that he “was human” (a Freudian slip?). You don’t see him at parties in Palo Alto, dinners in Los Angeles, or galas in Washington, D.C., because what he might say, or with whom he might associate, could be leaked to the press and negatively construed, as was the case when he recently [dined with a group of conservatives]( https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/14/facebook-zuckerberg-conservatives-private-meetings-046663], and later with Donald Trump. So, late last month, when Zuckerberg made a rare public appearance at Silicon Slopes Tech Summit 2020 in Salt Lake City, he didn’t only shock the crowd and the news media with his appearance, but with what he said, too.

“My experience, growing up and running the company, is went out, talked about what we did, say some stupid things, get called out for it, and kind of go into a shell, and end up being really cautious about how we communicate,” Zuckerberg told the audience. “We shied away for a long time talking about some of the things, some of the principles we believe in that are increasingly controversial in the world.” Then, he noted that that was no longer going to be the case at Facebook. “This is the new approach, and I think it’s going to piss off a lot of people,” Zuckerberg said, “but frankly the old approach was pissing off a lot of people too, so let’s try something different.”

In Silicon Valley, this was met with cheers and jeers. “Finally, we get to see a version of Mark who has no fucks to give,” a friend of Zuckerberg’s who has known him since his Harvard University days, told me. “I think it’s fucking great! I love this version of Zuck so much more than the bullshit manicured-P.R. version of him.” Another person who has spent time with Zuckerberg socially seemed excited by the new Zuckerberg, even if they were unsure what that might look like. “I would love to see him strike back and see him say something that pushes his critics back,” they said. “Everyone’s made Facebook into this evil thing, but at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s that much worse than a lot of shit out there.”

The problem, both insiders and numerous people who know Zuckerberg have told me, is that the corporate-communications apparatus at Facebook is a behemoth unlike almost any in Silicon Valley, and the teams that surround Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg try desperately to control the narrative of how the company is perceived, and what happens to its stock price. Inside that machine, there are teams of people who safeguard Zuckerberg himself, like little bees protecting the queen. Sandberg has her own communications teams in the East Wing of the company. Facebook itself has hundreds of P.R. employees and external contractors that insulate product teams and internal communications teams and Instagram teams and on and on and on and on, making sure no one says anything publicly that could be taken out of context. The problem, as of late, and for the first time in Facebook’s history, is that it’s not what has happened publicly that has hurt Facebook, but the private machinations that once remained completely private, where audio recordings of Zuckerberg have leaked to the press and internal memos meant for Facebook employees have found their way onto the front page of the New York Times. Which leaves Zuckerberg and his hundreds of flacks with little to do but give fewer fucks, to borrow a description from the former Harvard student’s friend.