What Mark Zuckerberg Meta is Changing for the Trump Era

At this point, it’s pretty clear what Donald Trump wants from Mark Zuckerberg. But what does Zuckerberg, who has now gone to Mar-a-Lago twice since the November election, want from the President-elect?

That’s the question I’ve been asking sources in and around Meta over the past few days. All of them described Meta’s relationship with the outgoing Biden administration as extremely hostile. It’s safe to assume that Zuckerberg wants a reset for the MAGA regime, especially since Trump threatened to imprison him for life not too long ago.

In Trump’s America, removing tampons from men’s bathrooms on Meta campuses — a real thing that just happened — is as much a business decision as a political one. Destroying the ‘woke’ ideology is a key pillar of Trump’s stated mandate. Others who know they have to play the game, like Amazon, are also starting to fall in line. However, Zuckerberg is transforming Meta for this new political reality at a speed that is unusual for a company of its size and influence. Founder’s way.

In his conversation with Joe Rogan and his Instagram video, Zuckerberg shared a list of issues Trump could help him with: fighting other countries that are increasing their control over his platforms, stopping Apple from dictating how it builds mobile apps and smart glasses (the latter growing increasingly important to Meta’s future), and, perhaps most importantly, keeping AI’s internal regulation from slowing down its efforts to suppress OpenAI. Elon Musk bought Trump’s ear. But the more time Zuckerberg spends at Mar-a-Lago, the more Sam Altman AND Tim Cook should be concerned.

Next is the US government’s case to separate Meta which will go to trial in a few months. After the turmoil that has been the last four years, it is easy to forget that this lawsuit was filed at the end of Trump’s first term by a Republican chairman of the FTC, not Lina Khan…

Most of the headlines of the past week have focused on Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking program. It was a convenient scapegoat for company executives who, frankly, never followed through on the goal of bringing more neutrality to Facebook and Instagram. The Community Notes alternative, Meta, which is leaving X, wasn’t on the product roadmap before this week, so it’ll probably be a while before everyone sees it in the wild.

The announcement that US moderators will move from California to Texas is perhaps the most cynical of all; talk to anyone in the know and they’ll tell you that the vast majority of moderators are already based in Austin.

The hate speech that is now allowed on Meta is in the spotlight and will deserve more scrutiny in the coming weeks. The decision to start recommending political content again is a 180-degree turn for Zuckerberg. But insiders believe the most impactful change for users of Meta’s apps will be toning down its systems that remove content for potential policy violations.

Of all the announcements Meta made last week, this is the one I believe is the least related to Trump. Meta executives have signaled for some time that they know they are mistakenly removing a lot of content that doesn’t actually violate the rules; I’m told it’s one of, if not THEthe biggest complaint in user surveys. If done correctly, rolling back moderation errors could be the one thing Zuckerberg announced that makes everyone happy.

• CES is for deals now: Every year, the official CES show — the huge show floor and flashy keynotes — feels more like an advertising exercise than a place to launch real products. Much of the energy has shifted to private meeting rooms and happy hours at the Wynn, Aria and Cosmopolitan, where tech executives are grilling CMOs and making deals with partners all week long. In this shadow CES, everyone seems to agree that the show is more alive than ever. Booths on the showroom floor have become marketing tools to show off to customers before taking them to a steak dinner. The challenge for CES organizers will be figuring out how to overcome the growing influence of this part of the show with their current business model of charging people to walk through booths filled with smart toasters and concept cars.
• TikTok can simply be banned: Imagine an alternate world in which the Chinese government bans Instagram from operating in the country and Mark Zuckerberg it is hidden. This is the situation with ByteDance and its founder Zhang Yimingwho stepped down as CEO after the latest US ban attempt but still controls the company. He allowed TikTok to be banned in India and apparently has no interest in the app surviving this time, so why not allow the same thing to happen again?
• Google and OpenAI look at what’s next: Google’s DeepMind unit is embarking on “an ambitious project to build generative models that simulate the physical world,” which it believes is “on the critical path to general artificial intelligence.” Meanwhile, OpenAI is returning to its early roots by creating a “general-purpose robotics” team that will build hardware and push “toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments.” We may have hit a scaling wall in text data, but big labs clearly see an opportunity in 3D. (See also what Nvidia announced last week.)
• Other titles you may have missed: Tencent (a major investor in Epic Games, Snap and US tech companies) was blacklisted by the Pentagon for allegedly being under the influence of the Chinese military. Tim Cook’s total compensation rose 18 percent last year to $74.6 million. Elon Musk is hosting an inauguration party for Trump in DC with Uber and Free Press. by Sam Altman the sister filed a lawsuit against him for sexual abuse.

Some recent, important job changes in the tech world:

• A bunch of changes to the Meta: UFC CEO Dana WhiteCEO of Exor John Elkann, AND Charlie Songhurst joined the board. Joel Kaplan is running policies and communications now. After a stint at Google, they told me Michael Levinson returning as VP of product for Integrity org. (Good luck!) Civil rights chief, Roy Austinis leaving And former DEI chief Maxine Williams is now head of “accessibility and engagement”.
• of Elon Musk X appointed some new leaders: Romina Khananisho is the new head of government affairs and John Nitti is the head of “ad innovation”.
• Calista Redmon joined Nvidia as vice president of “global AI initiatives,” where she will “drive the adoption of the NVIDIA platform for national and regional AI initiatives.”
• Sophia Dominguezdirector of Snap’s AR platform, leaves.

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As always, I want to hear from you, especially if you work in Meta. Reply here and I’ll get back to you or you can contact me securely on Signal.