Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era

Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.

Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his staff to translate these changes into policy.

Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his handpicked team how to do it in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to work, while Mr. Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the island of Kauai.

On New Year’s Day, Mr. Zuckerberg ready to announce the changes, according to four current and former Meta employees and advisers with knowledge of the events, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions.

The whole process was very unusual. Meta typically changes policies governing its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any changes usually take months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint that dazzled even staffers on his policy and integrity teams.

On Tuesday, most of Meta’s 72,000 employees heard about Mr. Zuckerberg’s plans along with the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant said it was overhauling speech on its apps by loosening restrictions on how people can talk about contentious social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking program that had been aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to police falsehoods. And it said it would insert more political content into people’s feeds after previously toning down that particular material.

In the days that followed, the measures – which have far-reaching consequences for what people want to see online – drew applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives, criticism from President Biden, derision from fact-checking groups and disinformation researchers, and concerns from LGBTQ advocacy groups who fear the changes will lead to more people being harassed online and offline.

Inside Meta, the reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees have celebrated the moves, while others were shocked and have openly criticized the changes on the company’s internal message boards. Several employees wrote that they were ashamed to work for Meta.

On Friday, Meta’s makeover continued as the company told employees it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated its role as chief diversity officer, ended its diversity hiring goals that required hiring a certain number of women and minorities, and said it would no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring suppliers.

Meta planned to “focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that reduce bias for everyone, regardless of your background,” Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal memo forwarded to The New York Times.

At the White House on Friday, President Biden told reporters that Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision to abandon fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram was “shameful”.

In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisers described Mr. Zuckerberg that his shift serves a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the current political landscape, with conservative power rising in Washington as Mr. Trump takes office on January 20. More than that, the changes reflect Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal views on how his $1.5 trillion company should be run — and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, has regularly spoken to friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are being policed, the people said. He has also felt sidetracked by what he sees as the anti-tech stance of the Biden administration and shunned by what he sees as progressives in the media and in Silicon Valley — including in Meta’s workforce — pushing him to take a hard line in the police discourse, they said.

Meta declined to comment.

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg that it was time to go “back to our original mission” by giving people “the power to share.” He said he had felt pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding: “I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and that’s how it will be forward-looking.”

The latest changes were catalyzed by Mr. Trump’s victory in November. That month, Mr. Zuckerberg to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the President-elect’s inaugural fund.

At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg to prepare to change speech policies. Knowing that any move would be contentious, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime political leader with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, the head of American politics; and David Ginsberg, communications manager. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted on no leaks, people with knowledge of the effort said.

The group worked to revise Meta’s “hate speech” policy, with Mr. Zuckerberg in the lead, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which describes what to do with defamation, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to “hateful conduct.”

It effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from speech, minimizing Meta’s role in policing conversations online. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin was the cheerleader of the changes, these people said.

Mr. Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr. Kaplan to Meta’s head of global public policy to implement the changes and deepen Meta’s ties to the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, a former UK deputy prime minister who had handled policy and regulatory issues globally. for Meta since 2018. The evening before Meta’s announcement, Mr. Kaplan individual calls with top conservative social media influencers, two people said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg the new speech policies in his Instagram video. Mr. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of Mr. Trump’s media diet, saying Meta’s fact-checking partners “had too much political bias.”

(Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked).

Among its changes, Meta loosened rules allowing people to post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including allowing “claims of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation. ” The company cited political discourse about transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that prohibited users from saying that people of certain races were responsible for the spread of the coronavirus.

Some training materials Meta created for the new policies were confusing and contradictory, said two employees who reviewed the documents. Some of the text said “white people have a mental illness” would be banned on Facebook, but saying “gay people have a mental illness” was allowed, they said.

Meta locked down access to the policies and training materials internally late Thursday, they said, hours after The Intercept published extract.

The company also removed the transgender and non-binary “themes” on its Messenger chat app, which allow users to customize the app’s colors and wallpaper, two employees said. The change was reported formerly of 404 Media.

That same day, at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facility managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms that the company had provided for non-binary and transgender employees using the men’s room who may need sanitary napkins , two employees said.

Some employees were outraged by what they saw as efforts by managers to hide changes in “hateful conduct” before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy department typically see and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.

At Workplace, Meta’s Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing about the changes. In the Pride@ employee resource group, where workers who support LGBTQ issues meet, at least one person announced their resignation as others privately told each other they planned to look for jobs elsewhere, two people said.

In a post this week to the Pride@ group, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, defended Mr. Zuckerberg and said topics like transgender issues had been politicized. He said Meta’s policies shouldn’t get in the way of allowing community debate, pointing to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of “the courts coming before society” in the 1970s. Mr. Schultz said the courts had “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be debated civilly.

“You find that issues become politicized and stay in the political conversation for much longer than they would have if society just discussed them,” wrote Mr. Schultz. He said looser restrictions on speech in Meta’s apps would allow for this kind of debate.

On Friday, Roy Austin, Meta’s vice president of civil rights, announced that he is leaving the company. He did not give a reason.

Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, this week, four people with knowledge of his activities said, and on Friday he was said to have been at Mar-a-Lago.

In his interview with Mr. Rogan denied Mr. Zuckerberg has made sweeping changes to appease the incoming Trump administration, but said the election influenced his thinking.

“The good thing about doing it after the election is you get this cultural pulse,” he said. “We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn’t say that were just mainstream discourse.”

Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed with reporting.