Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his opinion small.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, tapped a handful of senior 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 for Thanksgiving. Now he needed his staff to translate those changes into policy.
During the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his handpicked team discussed how to do this in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole 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.
By New Year’s Day, Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to go public with 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 routinely changes the policies governing its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Each change usually takes months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blinding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.
On Tuesday, most of Meta’s 72,000 employees learned of Mr. Zuckerberg along with the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant said it was revising speech on its apps by removing restrictions on how people can talk about controversial social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking program aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to police fakes. And it said it would inject more political content into people’s feeds, having previously de-emphasized that material.
In the days since, the moves — which have sweeping implications for what people will see online — have drawn applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives, derision from fact-checking groups and disinformation researchers, and concerns from LGBTQ advocacy groups that they fear that the changes will lead for more people being bullied online and offline.
Within Meta, the reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees have celebrated the moves, while others have been shocked and openly criticized the changes on internal company message boards. Some employees wrote that they were ashamed to work for Meta.
On Friday, Meta’s turnaround continued when the company told employees it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. She eliminated her role as chief diversity officer, ended diversity hiring goals that required hiring a certain number of women and minorities, and said she would no longer give preference to minority-owned businesses when hiring salespeople.
Meta planned to “focus on how to implement fair and sustainable practices that mitigate bias for everyone, regardless of your background,” Justine Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post shared with The New York Times. .
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisors to Mr. Zuckerberg describes his change as having a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the current political landscape, with a rise in conservative power in Washington as Mr. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. More than that, the changes reflect the personal views of Mr. Zuckerberg on how his $1.5 trillion company should be run. and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.
Mr. 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 stung by what he sees as the anti-tech stance of the Biden administration and stung by what he sees as progressives in the media and in Silicon Valley — including Meta’s workforce — prompting him to take a heavy hand in police discourse. , they said.
Meta declined to comment. In an Instagram video on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression” and added that he was trying to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”
The latest changes were catalyzed by Mr Trump’s victory in November. That month, Mr. Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet Mr Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund.
In Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg began preparations to change the 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 longtime policy executive with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, head of US policy; and David Ginsberg, head of communications and global affairs. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted there will be no leaks, people with knowledge of the effort said.
The group worked on revising Meta’s “Hate Language” policy, with Mr. Zuckerberg leading the charge, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which sets out what to do with profanity, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to “Hateful Conduct”.
This effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from speech, minimizing Meta’s role in policing online conversation. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were cheerleaders for change, these people said.
Mr. Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr. 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 British deputy prime minister who had handled the issues. of policy and regulation at the global level. for Meta since 2018. The night before Meta’s announcement, Mr. Kaplan held individual calls with key conservative social media influencers, two of the people said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced the new speech policies in an Instagram video. Mr. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of Mr. Trump’s media diet, saying that Meta’s fact-checking partners “had a lot of political bias.”
(Fact-checking groups that have 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 removed rules so people could 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 the 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. Some of the text said saying “white people have mental illness” would be banned on Facebook, but saying “gay people have mental illness” was allowed, they said.
Meta shut down access to internal policies and training materials late Thursday, they said, hours after The Intercept published excerpts.
The company also removed transgender and non-binary “themes” on its Messenger chat app, which allows users to customize the app’s colors and background, two employees said. 404 Media reported earlier on the change.
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, which the company had provided for non-binary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and may need them. for sanitary pads, two. the employees said.
Some employees were angry at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “hate conduct” policy before it was announced, two of the people said. While people across the policy division usually watch and comment on major revisions, most didn’t get the chance this time.
In Workplace, Meta’s internal communication software Slack, employees began to debate the changes. At the @Pride employee resource group, which brings together workers who support LGBTQ issues, at least one person announced their resignation after others privately relayed to each other that they planned to look for work elsewhere, two people said.
In a post this week to the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, defended Mr. Zuckerberg said that topics such as transgender issues were politicized. He said Meta’s policies should not stifle social debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of the “courts getting ahead of society” in the 1970s. Mr. Schultz said the courts “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be debated in a civil manner.
“You see topics become politicized and stay in the political conversation for much longer than they would have if society were just debating them,” wrote Mr. Schultz. He said looser speech restrictions on Meta’s apps would allow this kind of debate.
On Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted on Threads, his X-like social network, to defend his changes.
“Some people may turn away from our platforms for virtue signaling,” he wrote. “I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better.”
