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Mark Zuckerberg announcement this week that Goal would change its moderation policies to allow greater “free speech” was widely seen as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of his Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make peace with Trump since his election victory in November.
This follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term, which ended with Facebook, similar to other social media companies, banning Trump from its platform.
As recently as March, Trump was wearing his preferred nickname of “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about the CEO of Meta and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”
With Meta now positioning itself to be a key player in artificial intelligenceZuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and implements policies that will allow it to realize its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak. on the matter.
“As powerful as Facebook is, it still had to kneel before Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president 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 such as immigration and gender identity, and return political content to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg presented the broad policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content moderation apparatus, which saying had “reached a point where there are too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The policy shift was the latest strategic shift Meta has made to align with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.
one day before, announced goal that UFC CEO Dana White, an old friend of Trump, will join the company’s board of directors.
And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s vice president of policy. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with 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 long ties to the Republican Party and once worked as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan aware Facebook photos of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during his visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, vice president of global policy at Facebook, on April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | PA Images | fake images
Many Meta employees criticized the policy change Internally, some say the company is absolving itself of its responsibility to create a secure platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more online abuse due to the new policy, which will go into effect in the coming weeks.
Despite the employee backlash, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make such moves after laying off 21,000 employeesor almost a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
These cuts affected a large part of Meta’s activity. civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to oppose certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction in making broad policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months before the election.
After Trump’s first assassination attempt in July, Zuckerberg called out Trump’s photo raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the rudest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
One month later, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.
“I think the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more frank about it,” he wrote.
After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other technology executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Goal too donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Friday Goal revealed to your workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, representing another pro-Trump move.
The day before, some details of the company’s new relaxed content moderation guidelines were released. published by the news site The Intercept, displaying the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements like “Immigrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge was the one who stole my backpack today after of athletics practice”. “We are all thieves.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees over the past two administrations, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.
Although Meta’s content policy updates took many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives were formulating the plans after the US election results. By New Year’s Day, the leadership began planning public announcements of its policy change, the people said.
Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after major U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, former Facebook policy director and CEO of tech consultancy Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a shift in power, Meta adjusts its policies to better fit its business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.
“In 2028, they will be recalibrated again,” he said.
After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the United States to meet people in states he had not previously visited. He published a 6,000-word article. manifest emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.
The social media company faced harsh criticism for fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
After the 2020 elections, in the middle of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on Covid-19 content, with a policy executive. saying in 2021 that the “amount of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine that violates our policies is too much by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but they drew the ire of Republicans.
Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.
“Here in Silicon Valley there was no business risk in being more right-wing,” Harbath said.
While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has a lot at stake.
The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations compared to those in the European Union, where Meta says The harsh restrictions have caused the company not to publish some of its most advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other technology giants, also needs more massive data centers and cutting-edge computing chips to help train and run your advanced AI models.
“There is a business benefit when Republicans win, because they are traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts as he testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the US Capitol in Washington, US, on January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta is not the only one trying to get close to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflect a particular level of animosity expressed by Trump over the years.
Trump accused Meta of censorship and expressed resentment over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In July 2024, Trump published in social truth that he intended to “go after election fraudsters to levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, beware!” Triumph reiterated that statement In his book “Save America,” he writes that Zuckerberg conspired against him during 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 a year providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those threats are catalogued, analyzed and analyzed by Meta’s multitude of security teams.
After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could weaponize the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and how much it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president. said the person, who asked not to be identified due to confidentiality.
Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president carry their own risks.
After Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy on Tuesday, Boland, the former executive, was among several users who took to the Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers they were leaving Facebook.
“Last post before deletion,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before any of her Threads followers could see the post, Meta’s content moderation system removed it, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but laugh at the situation.
“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodríguez contributed to this report.
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