Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thoughts small.
Last month, Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, reached out to some of its top political, communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online discourse. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn these changes into policy.
Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his select team discussed how to do this in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates slipped away from family dinners and holiday gatherings for work, while Mr. Zuckerberg took stock between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and on the island of Kauai.
By New Year’s Day, Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to make the changes public, according to four current and former Meta employees and consultants familiar with the events, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions.
The whole process was very unusual. Meta typically changes policies governing its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any changes generally take months. But Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a tight six-week sprint, 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 is overhauling discourse on its apps by easing restrictions on how people can talk about controversial social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking program that was intended to curb misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to fact-check falsehoods. And he said he would push more political content into people’s feeds after previously de-emphasizing that material.
In the days since, the moves — which have sweeping implications for what people will see online — have drawn applause from Trump and conservatives, criticism from President Biden, derision from fact-checking groups and disinformation researchers , and concerns from LGBTQ advocacy groups. who fear the changes will lead to more people experiencing harassment online and offline.
Within Meta the reaction was sharply divided. Some employees celebrated the move, while others were shocked and openly criticized the changes on the company’s internal forums. Several employees wrote that they were ashamed of working for Meta.
On Friday, Meta’s makeover continued as the company told employees it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated its role as chief diversity officer, ended its diversity hiring goals that required employing a certain number of women and minorities, and said it would no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses in the hiring suppliers.
Meta intended to “focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for everyone, regardless of background,” Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post forwarded to the New York Times.
At the White House on Friday, President Biden told reporters that Zuckerberg’s decision to abandon fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram was “shameful.”
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and Zuckerberg advisors described his change as dual-purpose. It positions Meta in the political landscape of the moment, with conservative power on the rise in Washington when Trump takes office on January 20. Furthermore, 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 views hidden.
Zuckerberg, 40, has regularly spoken to friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are controlling speech, the people said. He has also felt targeted by what he sees as the Biden administration’s anti-tech stance, and stung by those he sees as progressives in the media and Silicon Valley – including Meta’s workforce – pushing him to take a stand. heavy hand in controlling speech. , they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg said it was time to return “to our original mission” by giving people “the power to share.” He said he felt pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding: “I now have much more control over what I think the policy should be, and that’s how it’s going to go 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 parole policies. Knowing that any move would be controversial, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime political official with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, the head of American politics; and David Ginsberg, the communications chief. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted there were no leaks, the people familiar with the operation said.
The group has been working on overhauling Meta’s “hate speech” policy, with Zuckerberg leading the charge, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which sets out what to do with slurs, 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 controlling online conversation. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were supporters of the changes, these people said.
Mr. Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr. Kaplan to head of Meta’s global public policy to implement changes and deepen Meta’s ties to the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister who had managed global political and regulatory issues. for Meta since 2018. The night before Meta’s announcement, Mr. Kaplan held one-on-one calls with top conservative social media influencers, two of the 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, saying Meta’s fact-checking partners “had too much political bias.”
(The fact-checking groups that worked with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the fact-checked content.)
Among its changes, Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hate people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including allowing “allegations of mental illness or abnormality based on gender or sexual orientation”. The company cited political discourse around transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that prohibited users from claiming that people of certain races were responsible for spreading 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 texts said that saying “white people have a mental illness” would be prohibited on Facebook, but saying “gay people have a mental illness” was allowed, they said.
Meta internally blocked access to the policies and training materials late Thursday, they said, just hours after The Intercept published the excerpts.
The company also removed transgender and nonbinary “themes” from its Messenger chat app, which allows users to customize the app’s colors and background, two employees said. The change was previously reported by 404 Media.
On the same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facility managers were asked to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided to nonbinary and transgender employees who use male bathrooms. men and who may have needed pads, two employees said.
Some employees were furious at what they saw as attempts by managers to hide changes to the “hateful conduct” policy before it was announced, two of the people said. While members of the political division typically view and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.
On Workplace, Meta’s Slack-like internal communications software, employees began discussing the changes. At the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support LGBTQ issues gather, at least one person announced their resignation while others said privately that they planned to look for work elsewhere, two of the people said.
In a post this week to the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, defended Zuckerberg and said that topics such as transgender issues have become politicized. He said Meta’s policies should not impede social debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of “courts that got ahead of society” in the 1970s. Schultz said the courts have “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be debated civically.
“You find that topics become politicized and remain in the political conversation much longer than they would if society simply discussed them,” Schultz wrote. He said looser restrictions on free speech in Meta’s apps would allow for this kind of debate.
On Friday, Roy Austin, Meta’s vice president of civil rights, announced he is leaving the company. He didn’t give a reason.
Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, this week, four people familiar with his activities said, and on Friday he was said to have been at Mar-a-Lago.
In his interview with Rogan, Zuckerberg denied making sweeping changes to please the new Trump administration, but said the election had influenced his thinking.
“The good thing about doing it after the election is that you can capture this cultural impulse,” he said. “We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn’t say were just mainstream discourse.”
Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Habermann AND Jonathan Cigno contributed to the reporting.