Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thoughts small.
Last month, Meta CEO Zuckerberg tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company's approach to online speech. He had decided to make radical changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policies.
Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his hand-picked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls, and late-night group chats. Some subordinates slipped away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to go to work, while Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay area and the island of Kauai.
By New Year's Day, Zuckerberg was ready to make the changes public, 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 modifies the policies governing its apps (which include facebook, instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads) by inviting employees, civic leaders, and others to weigh in. Any change usually takes months. But Zuckerberg turned this last-ditch effort into a tight six-week race, surprising even employees on his policy and integrity teams.
On Tuesday, most of Meta's 72,000 employees learned of Zuckerberg's plans along with the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant said it was reshaping speech on its apps by relaxing restrictions on how people can talk about contentious social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It eliminated its fact-checking program that aimed to curb misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to police falsehoods. And he said he would insert more political content into people's feeds after previously downplaying that same material.
In the days since, the measures, which have broad implications for what people will see online, have drawn cheers from Trump and conservatives, ridicule from fact-checking groups and misinformation researchers, and concerns from LGBTQ advocacy groups who fear that the changes will lead to more people being harassed online and offline.
Within Meta, the reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees celebrated the changes, while others were surprised and openly criticized the changes on the company's internal message boards. Several employees wrote that they were embarrassed to work for Meta.
On Friday, Meta's revamp continued as the company told employees it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated its chief diversity officer role, ended its diversity hiring goals that called for employing 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 mitigate bias for everyone, regardless of their background,” Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post that was passed on to The New York Times.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Zuckerberg Meta employees, executives and advisers described his shift as having a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the political landscape of the moment, with conservative power on the rise in Washington when Trump takes office on January 20. More than that, the changes reflect Zuckerberg's personal views on how his $1.5 trillion company should be run. and he no longer wants to keep those opinions a secret.
Zuckerberg, 40, has spoken regularly with friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are controlling speech, the people said. He has also felt harassed by what he sees as the Biden administration's anti-tech stance, and hurt by what he sees as progressives in the media and in Silicon Valley (including Meta's workforce), pushing him to take a heavy hand in discourse. police. , they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg said it was time to “get back to our original mission” and give people “the power to share.” He said he felt pressure from the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding: “I now have much greater control of what I think policy should be, and that's how it will move forward.”
The latest changes were catalyzed by Trump's victory in November. That month, Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the president-elect's inaugural fund.
At Meta, Zuckerberg began preparing to change speech policies. Knowing that any move would be controversial, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen advisers and close lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a veteran policy executive with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, US policy chief; and David Ginsberg, head of communications. Zuckerberg insisted that data not be leaked, people with knowledge of the effort said.
The group worked on revising Meta's “Hate Speech” policy, with Zuckerberg at the helm, they said. They renamed the policy, which dictates what to do about insults, threats against protected groups, and other harmful content on their apps, to “Hateful Conduct.”
That effectively shifted the rules' emphasis away from speech, minimizing Meta's role in policing online conversation. Kaplan and Martin encouraged the changes, these people said.
Zuckerberg decided to promote Kaplan to Meta's head of global public policy to carry out the changes and deepen Meta's ties to the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain who had handled political issues and regulations worldwide. for Meta since 2018. The night before Meta's announcement, Kaplan held one-on-one calls with top conservative social media influencers, two people said.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg made the new speech policies public in his instagram video. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of Trump’s media diet, and said 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 relaxed rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including allowing “accusations of mental illness or abnormality based on gender or sexual orientation.” The company cited political discourse on 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. Part of the text said that saying “white people are mentally ill” would be banned on facebook, but saying “gay people are mentally ill” was allowed, they said.
Meta internally blocked access to policies and training materials late Thursday, they said, hours later. <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook–instagram-meta-hate-speech-content-moderation/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>The interception published extracts.
The company also removed transgender and non-binary “themes” on its Messenger chat app, which allows users to customize the app's colors and wallpaper, two employees said. 404 Media before reported about the change.
That same day, at Meta offices in Silicon Valley, Texas, and New York, facility managers were instructed to remove tampons from men's bathrooms, which the company had provided to nonbinary and transgender employees who use the tampon. men's bathroom and may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.
Some employees were furious about what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy division often see and comment on important reviews, most didn't get the chance this time.
At Workplace, Meta's Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing about the changes. At the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support LGBTQ issues gather, at least one person announced their resignation while others communicated privately that they planned to look for work elsewhere, two people said.
In a post this week in the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta's chief marketing officer, defended Zuckerberg and said topics like transgender issues had become politicized. He said Meta's policies should not stand in the way of social debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade's landmark abortion case as an example of how “the courts got ahead of society” in the 1970s. Schultz said the courts “politicized” the issue rather than allowing it to be debated civilly.
“We find that issues become politicized and remain in the political conversation much longer than they would have if society simply debated them,” Schultz wrote. He said looser restrictions on expression in Meta apps would allow for this type of debate.
In his interview with Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg denied making sweeping changes to appease the incoming Trump administration, but said the election did influence his thinking.
“The nice thing about doing it after the election is that you can take the cultural pulse,” he said. “We got to this point where there were things that couldn't be said and that were just dominant discourses.”
