Last month, Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tapped a handful of top 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 over Thanksgiving.
Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his handpicked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats.
By New Year’s Day, 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 entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters policies that govern its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any shifts generally take months. But Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.
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 was overhauling speech on its apps by loosening restrictions on how people can talk about contentious social issues such as immigration and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking program that had been aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to police falsehoods.
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 misinformation researchers, and concerns from L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups that fear the changes will lead to more people getting harassed online and offline.
Inside Meta, the reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees have celebrated the moves, while others were shocked and have openly castigated the changes on the company’s internal message boards. Several employees wrote that they were ashamed to work for Meta.
On Friday, Meta’s makeover continued when the company told employees that it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated its chief diversity officer role, ended its diversity hiring goals that called for the employment of a certain number of women and minorities, and said it would no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring vendors.
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 advisers to Zuckerberg described his shift as serving a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the political landscape of the moment, with conservative power ascendant in Washington as Trump takes office on Jan. 20. More than that, the changes reflect Zuckerberg’s personal views of how his $1.5 trillion company should be run — and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.
Zuckerberg, 40, has regularly spoken to friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are policing speech, the people said. He has also felt railroaded by what he views as the Biden administration’s anti-tech posturing, and stung by what he sees as progressives in the media and in Silicon Valley — including in Meta’s work force — pushing him to take a heavy hand in policing discourse, they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg said it was time to go “back to our original mission” by giving people “the power to share.” He said he had felt pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding, “I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and this is how it’s going to be going forward.”
The latest changes were catalyzed by Trump’s victory in November. That month, Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund.
At Meta, Zuckerberg began preparing to change speech policies. Knowing that any moves would be contentious, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers.
They changed the name of the policy, which lays out what to do with slurs, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to “Hateful Conduct.”
That effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from speech, minimizing Meta’s role in policing online conversation.
Among its changes, Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including permitting “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” It also removed a rule that forbade users to say people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.
The New York Times
