Meta to End Fact-Checking Program on Facebook Ahead of Trump Term: Live Updates

That was Mark Zuckerberg in his 20s. Mark Zuckerberg in his 40s is a very different Mark Zuckerberg.

In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisors, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington. He and others at the top of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, believed that both parties loathed technology and that attempts to continue engaging in political matters would only draw further scrutiny to their company.

As recently as June at the Allen and Company conference — the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho — Mr. Zuckerberg to several people over the backlash to Meta that came from the more politically sensitive aspects of his philanthropic efforts. And he regretted hiring associates in his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left for some reasons.

In short – he was over it.

His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all.

Publicly, this means that Mr. Zuckerberg refuses to engage with Washington except when necessary. Privately, he has stopped supporting programs in his philanthropy that could be perceived as partisan, and he has dampened employee activism at Meta, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so or did not want to . to bring their relationship to Mr. Zuckerberg in danger.

He also spoke with former President Donald J. Trump in one-on-one phone calls twice over the summer, these people said, a move that some have characterized as an attempt to repair a long-strained relationship between the two men .

“The political environment, I think I didn’t have a lot of sophistication around me, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” Mr. Zuckerberg during a recent interview at a live podcast event in San Francisco.

Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly regretted some of his political activities in a letter to Congress. He said the 2021 Biden administration “pushed” Meta to censor more Covid-19 content than Mr. Zuckerberg felt comfortable. And he said he would not repeat the contributions he made in 2020 to support election infrastructure because the gifts made him appear not “neutral.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s development has attracted relatively little attention compared to tech titans like Elon Musk, who has publicly aligned himself with conservatives and Mr. Trump. But it also reflects a larger shift in Silicon Valley, where top executives have grown frustrated over contentious social issues. Their response has largely been to pull away from it.

“Mark and his peers are likely looking at the risk of political engagement and deciding that neutrality is the safest choice until this election is over,” said Nu Wexler, principal at political consulting firm Four Corners Public Affairs and a former Facebook employee.

Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now his personal politics to be more like libertarianism or “classical liberalism,” according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulation that constrains business, an embrace of free markets and globalism, and an openness to social justice reforms — but only if it stops short of what he views as far-left progressivism. And Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, have been privately horrified by what they see as a rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses, including at their alma mater, Harvard.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s and Dr. Chan’s representatives at Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative declined to comment.

It’s a significant shift for a leader who in 2013 co-founded and became the public face of the political advocacy group Fwd.US, whose goal was to help create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Two years later, inspired by Bill Gates, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan The Chan Zuckerberg Initiativea philanthropic organization that poured $436 million over five years into issues like legalizing drugs and reducing incarceration.

In 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan wrote a letter to their newborn daughter who dreams of an egalitarian world where they could “eliminate poverty and hunger,” “provide basic health care to all,” and “foster peaceful and understanding relationships between people of all nations.” He hired a former top Obama adviser, David Plouffe, to oversee the work.

But over the next few years, Facebook faced accusations that the Russians had used it to divide voters. Mr. Zuckerberg and his company became a political lightning rod, with Democrats and Republicans blasting Facebook and its sister service Instagram for allowing too much — or too little — political speech.

From 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg to express confusion over the country’s changing politics, two people close to him said. And the scrutiny got Mr. Zuckerberg to see his more overtly political work at CZI as relatively ineffective.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan was taken aback by activism in their philanthropy, according to people close to them. Following the protests over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, a CZI employee asked Mr. Zuckerberg during a staff meeting to resign from Facebook or the initiative because of his unwillingness at the time to moderate comments from Mr. Trump.

The incident, and others like it, upset Mr. Zuckerberg, the people said, pushing him away from the foundation’s progressive political work. He came to see one of the three core departments on the initiative — the equity and opportunity team — as a distraction from the organization’s overall work and a poor reflection of his bipartisan viewpoint, the people said.

In 2021, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan to end the group’s internal political work and instead fund two bipartisan groups, including Fwd.us, working on these issues. Many of its 30 or so policy-focused employees quit, were reassigned or were sent to these two groups.

After the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, some staff at the initiative wanted the organization to focus on protecting access to abortion. But Dr. Chan, who runs CZI on a day-to-day basis, sent a memo to employees who flatly refused to do so. “We must remain focused and clear about what we are here to do. That means staying focused” on science, education and community service, she wrote, according to a portion of the memo reviewed by The Times. “We have no plans to expand our grants to new areas.”

Today, Mr. Zuckerberg, one of the initiative’s two top executives with Dr. Chan, less involved than he was two or three years ago, one employee said.

Other incidents piled up. After the election in 2020, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan criticized for donate $400 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life to help promote voting booth security during pandemic shutdowns. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan viewed their contribution as a nonpartisan effort, although advisers warned them they would be criticized for taking sides.

The donations became known as “Zuckerbucks” in Republican circles. Conservatives, including Mr. Trump and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, blasted Mr. Zuckerberg for what they said was an attempt to increase voter turnout in Democratic areas.

In private conversations with advisers and friends, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan expressed some regret over the contributions and how much they backfired.

The country should be staging a parade for election officials, and “they’ve been under attack” instead, said David Becker, who ran another of the Zuckerberg-backed 2020 programs, the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “I would understand if Mark Zuckerberg was frustrated by the manufactured controversy about this.”

Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg and his management cracked down on politics.

In late 2022, Lori Goler, Meta’s chief human resources officer, introduced a new internal policy called “community engagement expectations,” according to a copy of the memo reviewed by The Times. It prohibited employees from raising issues such as abortion, racial justice movements and wars in the workplace. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, championed the policy and was supported by Mr. Zuckerberg, two people familiar with the matter said.

Instead of publicly engaging with Washington, Mr. Zuckerberg’s relationship with politicians behind the scenes. After the “Zuckerbucks” criticism, Mr. Zuckerberg Brian Baker, a prominent Republican strategist, to improve his positioning with right-wing media and Republican officials. In the run-up to November’s election, Mr. Baker emphasized to Mr. Trump and his top aides that Mr. Zuckerberg has no plans to make similar donations, said a person familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Zuckerberg has yet to form a relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris. But during the summer, Mr. Zuckerberg’s first conversations with Mr. Trump since leaving office, according to people familiar with the talks.

During the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump publicly thanked the billionaire in a phone call saying that he “prayed” for Mr. Trump after the recent assassination attempt, according to a person briefed on the call.

Just a few weeks later they were talking again.

After Meta mistakenly took down pictures of the assassination attempt that circulated on Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg directly to the former president and apologized for the error, according to two people familiar with the conversation. Representatives of Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg has given different accounts of what happened during the call.

“Private discussions between President Trump and anyone else are just that — private,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman.

Mr. Zuckerberg hasn’t deluded himself into thinking that downplaying politics will completely solve all his personal frustrations or his company’s problems. But he believes it’s something Meta can bounce back from — eventually.

“I think it will take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand is back to where it could have been,” Mr. Zuckerberg at the podcast event “if I hadn’t messed up in the first place.”

Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Sound produced by Patricia Sulbarán.