Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: A casual sex website with an underage sex problem

• Power and Influence: DOGE goes headhunting 

• The Top 5: Where to travel after Davos 

• Plus: When a corporate marvel may be a communist spy ring; piecing together “Severance”; and an uncomfortable masterpiece

A couple years ago, Donald Trump was banned from Facebook, and just a few months ago, he was threatening to toss Mark Zuckerberg in jail. But that was then, and these days, the two seem to be closer to achieving a moment of Pax Meta—particularly after Zuckerberg extended a significant olive branch to Trump this week by dumping the company’s fact-checking program and some of its diversity initiatives.

Zuckerberg’s effort to forge an armistice with Trump is bringing sweeping changes to his company, and I expect more will likely come. For instance, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Zuckerberg shutter Meta’s Oversight Board, the company’s ombudsman-type organization offering recommendations on what Meta should do to fix perceived problems. The board was created around the same time Meta bolstered its fact-checking program, and both initiatives were in response to post-2016, anti-Trump sentiment.

Zuckerberg’s peace campaign could affect more than just Meta, I think. It could have ramifications for TikTok, too.

Trump has indicated he’s interested in finding a way for TikTok to avoid a U.S. ban because he doesn’t want Meta strengthened. He even made a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court to persuade it to delay the deadline for TikTok to find a new owner or be banned. (My colleague Kaya Yurieff has more on TikTok and the Supreme Court here.) But if Trump and Zuckerberg are on better terms now, Trump may have less interest in helping TikTok stick around. It’s a real “the enemy of my frenemy is no frenemy to me” situation. 

Let’s take a step back and consider an even broader industrywide perspective. As my colleagues Theo Wayt, Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and Nick Wingfield described yesterday, Zuckerberg’s rightward shift reflects a change across Silicon Valley. Other tech firms will inevitably make similar changes to curry favor with Trump, and that jockeying for position will affect more than just the companies making those alterations, as we may witness with TikTok and Trump.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

How a Casual Sex Website Left the Door Open for Teens 

In the last couple of years, Sniffies has become a popular digital meeting ground for gay men—helping lead to something of a rebirth of gay cruising culture. Sniffies is a simple thing: a website with a real-time map of naked men and no restrictions on what images they can show. No one needs an email or an account to use it, and as a browser-only platform, Sniffies doesn’t need to follow the rules of the Apple and Google app stores as rivals like Grindr must. 

The few barriers to using it have been part of its popularity. But the lack of safeguards has also made it possible for underage teenagers to use Sniffies to find adult men and then meet up with them for sex, according to the unsettling reporting collected by our Paris Martineau and Cory Weinberg. 

So far Sniffies and other similar companies have faced only limited legal threats thanks to the broad immunity granted by Section 230, the landmark law that protects internet companies from what users post on their sites. Still, attorneys seem eager to try a new legal strategy that could crack that shield—seeking to hold the companies accountable for creating products the attorneys argue are faultily designed. 

“If these dating apps can’t figure out how to not welcome children and how to not match them with adults, then they don’t have any business being in business,” said attorney Carrie Goldberg, who is leading a case against Grindr. 

Power and Influence

Inside the DOGE Recruitment Drive

As tidings of comfort and joy lit up Silicon Valley group chats in recent weeks, another wave of messages arrived bearing a different type of good cheer: recruitment pitches to join the Department of Government Efficiency, the pseudo-governmental group run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. 

“I’m basically helping the DOGE team bring on insanely talented people ahead of the transition. Can you commit to 80+ hrs a week in DC for 6 months?” read one message from Shahed Khan, the 29-year-old Loom co-founder who has been doing some recruiting for DOGE. 

As Donald Trump’s official return nears, Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE has gone into overdrive as it works to fill out its ranks, hoping to amass a staff of around 200 people, our Julia Black reports. Khan’s message illustrates that the working conditions aren’t likely to be cushy or glamorous, but they appeal to a certain type of techie who is clearly more interested in DOGE because of their adoration of Musk, not Trump. 

The Top Five

Where to Go After Doing Davos

Once all the schmoozing and networking at the World Economic Forum wraps up, who couldn’t use some R&R? Todd Plummer hit up some frequent Davos attendees and the people in their orbit for this list of destinations for some post-Davos PTO. 

So how does snow polo and fondue at Badrutt’s Palace sound?

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is out belly-tappin’ with Dubya. Reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Listening: For an Innie-sider’s Perspective 

Ahead of “Severance” fiiinally returning next Friday, I’ve got an amusing twofer to offer: Want to refresh your memory on what the heck happened on the show, which initially debuted three years ago—and get more insight on it than ever before? 

“The Severance Podcast” accomplishes both tasks with chuckles and élan, courtesy of the two hosts: show creator Ben Stiller and series star Adam Scott. They’re going episode by episode, hitting on all the major points, like the original pilot episode that was written but later scrapped. Nice to see there’s nothing wrong with their memory.

Really, it’s a threefer: Tune in, and you too can smirk at imagining the overly precocious Mad Man who sold Atlassian and Airbnb on sponsoring a pod about a bleak satire of Silicon Valley.—A.B

Reading: The Tao of Huawei 

Is Huawei, the gigantic Chinese tech firm, inseparable from the Chinese government? The U.S. government certainly thinks so, and in 2022, it banned sales of new Huawei products, fearing the Chinese could use them to spy on Americans. Meanwhile, Huawei denies that it is a government front. 

Eva Dou, The Washington Post’s China business and economics correspondent, probes further into that question with “House of Huawei,” which follows the ascent of company founder Ren Zhengfei. He started off in a humble Shenzhen apartment in the 1980s—but these days he enjoys a corporate realm complete with an expansive R&D campus featuring a replica of Versailles. (Yes, really.) 

Dou does her work with evenhandedness, though I dare anyone to read “House of Huawei” and draw any conclusion other than that the U.S. is absolutely correct about Huawei. Even if the company isn’t a government stooge, it is unquestionably a distinctively Chinese firm. It operates in a manner that will seem, well, incredibly foreign to anyone familiar with Western business practices, complete with the politboro-esque “Shareholder’s Meeting” that sits atop its org chart.—A.B. 

Watching: Brutal but Beautiful

Unlike the highly enjoyable Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” “The Brutalist” is not a film that will make you feel comfortable. But it is a powerful, wonderful movie of a kind that has gone out of style. Clocking in at three and a half hours, it may also try the patience of today’s TikTok generation. Don’t let that be an issue, though.

Starring Adrien Brody, “The Brutalist” is the story of a Hungarian Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who manages to make it to the U.S. after the war, eventually bringing his wife over as well. A famous architect before the war, Brody’s character finds his way to architecture stardom again thanks to a Pennsylvania business mogul played by Guy Pearce. This is not a normal boss-worker relationship: More details would spoil the story. Suffice it to say that the affluent Americans’ cluelessness about the horrors experienced by the Holocaust survivors is embarrassing, to say the least. 

At a time when movie theaters are overrun with action franchises and other kids’ material, “The Brutalist” is the kind of film everyone should see—in a theater. The photography, particularly the scenes in Italy’s famous Carrara marble quarries, is worth experiencing on the big screen.—Martin Peers

Final Thought

One of those weeks…