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Mark Zuckerberg’s forecast this week Meta that it would shift its moderation policies to allow for “more free speech” as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of its peers in Silicon Valley, Meta has taken a number of public steps to make amends with Trump since winning the election in November.
After four highly contentious years between the two during Trump’s first term, it ended when Facebook — like other social media companies — banned Trump from its platform.
As recently as March, it was Trump using his favorite nickname “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about Meta’s CEO and declaring That Facebook was “the enemy of the people”.
Positioning the meta to be now a key player in artificial intelligenceZuckerberg recognizes the need for support from the White House as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to fulfill its grand ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, who asked not to be named. about the subject
“As powerful as Facebook is, it had to bend the knee to Trump,” said former Facebook vice president Brian Boland, who left the company in 2020.
Meta declined to comment for this article.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta will end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity, and return political content to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg touted the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content moderation apparatus. he said “it has reached a point of too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The policy shift is the latest strategic shift Meta has made to align with Trump and the Republicans since Election Day.
A day before Meta announced UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump, is joining the company’s board.
And Meta announced it last week replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who was the company’s vice president of policy. Clegg had a career in British politics in the Liberal Democrat party, including as Deputy Prime Minister, while Kaplan was White House Deputy Chief of Staff under former President George W. Bush.
Kaplan, who joined Meta in 2011 when it was still known as Facebook, has longstanding ties to the Republican Party and once worked as a clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan published Photos of himself on Facebook with Vice President-elects JD Vance and Trump in their prime the visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, vice president of global policy at Facebook, on April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | PA Images | Getty Images
Many meta workers He criticized the policy change internally, some have argued that the company is absolving itself of the responsibility of creating a secure platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more online abuse because of the new policy, which will come into effect in the coming weeks.
Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is ready to make such moves after that. Laying off 21,000 workersor almost a quarter of its employees, in 2022 and 2023.
Those cuts affected a large portion of the Meta public integrity and trust and security groups. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to push back against some policy decisions, former workers said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction in making sweeping policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.
After the first attack on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called Trump’s photo raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the most evil things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg wrote a letter To the House Judiciary Committee, the Biden administration pressured Meta’s groups to censor certain Covid-19 content.
“I believe the pressure from the government was misplaced, and I regret that we were not more forthcoming about it,” he wrote.
After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other tech executives visit the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta too He gave a million dollars to Trump’s startup fund.
On Friday, Meta reveal to his employees In a statement obtained by CNBC, he said he plans to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in his hiring process, representing another pro-Trump move.
Earlier in the day, there were some details of the company’s relaxed new content moderation guidelines published By news site The Intercept, showing the offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, “Immigrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants. they’re all thieves.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been brought to Washington eight times in the past two administrations to testify before congressional committees, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.
While Meta’s content policy updates caught many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives were formulating plans after the US election results. By New Year’s Day, the leadership began planning public announcements of the policy change, the people said.
Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after major U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of policy and CEO of technology consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country experiences a power shift, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs depending on the political landscape, Harbath said.
“They will recalibrate in 2028,” he said.
After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the US to meet people in states he had never visited before. He published a 6,000-word essay manifesto Emphasizing Facebook’s need to build more communities.
The social media company faced harsh criticism over fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
After the 2020 election, in the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on Covid-19 content with an executive policy. saying In 2021, “the amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is excessive by our standards.” Those efforts appeased the Biden administration, but drew the ire of Republicans.
Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.
“There was no business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-wing,” Harbath said.
While Trump has offered few concrete policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has a lot at stake.
The White House may create more relaxed AI regulations compared to those in the European Union, where Meta he says The severe cuts have caused the company not to release some of its parts More advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, too the needs more massive data centers and state-of-the-art computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There’s a business benefit to Republicans winning because they’re traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 31, 2024 at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein Reuters
Meta isn’t alone in trying to cozy up to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflect a certain level of enthusiasm that Trump has expressed over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship, and has expressed resentment that the company suspended his Facebook and Instagram accounts for two years after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In July 2024, Trump published on Truth Social He added that “Electoral fraud is set to continue at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for a long time” “ZUCKERBUCKS, watch out!” Trump he repeated that statement in his book, “Save America,” he wrote that Zuckerberg ran against him in the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.
Meta spends $14 million annually to provide personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company looks at threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. These threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s numerous security teams.
After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams looked into how Trump could arm the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be named. confidentiality
Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president come with their own perils.
After Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy on Tuesday, Boland, a former executive, was among a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers they were leaving Facebook.
“Last post before deletion,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before any of his Threads followers could see the post, Meta’s content moderation system took it down, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but laugh at the situation.
“It’s ironic,” Boland said.
– CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
SEE: Meta is returning to the tradition of free speech, says Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former privacy chief
