Jakub Porzycki | Nurfoto | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta would focus its moderation policies to allow more “free speech” was widely seen as the company’s latest attempt to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of his Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.
It follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook —” along with other social media companies — banning Trump from its platform.
As recently as March, Trump was using his favorite nickname “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about Meta’s CEO and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”
With Meta now positioning itself as a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for support from the White House as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to meet its lofty ambitions, according to to people familiar with the company’s plans. asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still had to bend the knee to 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 would end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity, and bring political content to user feeds. Zuckerberg pitched sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content moderation apparatus, which he said had “reached a point where there’s just too much wrong and too much censorship.”
The policy shift was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to align with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.
A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, an old friend of Trump, is joining the company’s board.
And last week, Meta announced it would replace Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been vice president of company policy. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats, including as deputy prime minister, while Kaplan was deputy White House 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 posted photos on Facebook of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, on April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | Images of PA | Getty Images
Many Meta employees criticized the internal policy change, with some saying 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 because of the new policy, which will come into effect in the coming weeks.Â
Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make these kinds of moves after it laid off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
These cuts affected much of Meta’s civic integrity and trust and security teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to challenge some policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making sweeping policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg’s instructions to Trump began in the months before the election.
After the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called the photo of Trump raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta teams to censor some Covid-19 content.
“I believe the government pressure was misplaced and I’m sorry we weren’t more open about it,” he wrote.
After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other tech executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
On Friday, Meta disclosed to the workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in the hiring process, representing another Trump-friendly move.
A day ago, some details of the company’s new content moderation guidelines were released by news site The Intercept, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements such as ” Immigrants are no better than vomit.” and “I bet Jorge is the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has returned 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 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 about its policy change, the people said.
The meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after major U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former director of policy at Facebook and CEO of technology consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.Â
“In 2028, they will be recalibrated again,” she 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 manifesto stressing the need for Facebook to build more community.
The social media company faced fierce criticism over fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
After the 2020 election, at the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on Covid-19 content, with a policy executive saying in 2021 that “the amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is excessive according to our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but they drew the ire of Republicans.
The meta is reacting again at the moment, Harbath said.
“There wasn’t a business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-leaning,” 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 rules than those in the European Union, where Meta says tough restrictions have resulted in the company not releasing some of its most advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, also needs more massive data centers and more advanced computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There’s a business benefit to winning Republicans because they’re traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg reacts as he testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the US Capitol in Washington, US, January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta isn’t the only one trying to cozy up to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflect a particular level of hostility Trump has expressed over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship and expressed displeasure 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 posted on Social Truth that he intended to “go after election fraud at unprecedented levels and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, watch out!” Trump repeated this statement in his book, Save America, writing 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 annually on personal insurance for Zuckerberg and his family, according to a company representative’s statement for 2024. As part of that insurance, the company analyzes any 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 multiple security groups.
After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could arm the Justice Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and how much it would cost the company to protect its CEO against a sitting president. said the person, who asked not to be named for confidentiality reasons.
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 a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers they were leaving Facebook.Â
Last post before deletion,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before the post could be seen by any of his followers on Threads, Meta’s content moderation system had removed it, citing cybersecurity reasons.Â
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but laugh at the situation.Â
“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.
CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
WATCH: Meta is returning to the tradition of free speech, says former Facebook privacy chief Chris Kelly
