Jakub Porzycki | Photo only | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg's announcement this week that Meta The company would change its moderation policy to allow for more “free speech.” This was widely seen as the company's latest attempt to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November, more than any other Silicon Valley competitor.
This follows four highly contentious years between the two during Trump's first term, which ended with Facebook – similar to other social media companies – banning Trump from its platform.
As recently as March, Trump used his preferred nickname “Sugar Jewelry” when discussing the CEO of Meta and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”
With Meta now positioning itself as a major player in the artificial intelligence space, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for support from the White House as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to fulfill its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the People familiar with the company's plans asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on this matter.
“Facebook, as powerful as it is, still had to bow 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, lift restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bring political content back into users' feeds. Zuckerberg called the sweeping policy changes key to stabilizing Meta's content moderation apparatus, which he said has “reached a point where there are just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The policy shift was the latest strategic shift Meta has made since Election Day to work with Trump and Republicans.
A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump friend, was joining the company's board.
And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, the company's current vice president of 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 the company was still known as Facebook, has long-standing 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 | PA Pictures | Getty Images
Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally. Some said the company abdicated its responsibility to create a safe platform. Current and former employees also expressed concerns that marginalized communities could face more online abuse as a result of the new policy, which is set to take effect in the coming weeks.
Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company's thinking said Meta was more willing to make such moves after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
These cuts impacted much of Meta's civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civic integrity group was the company's closest thing to an employee union because its members were willing to oppose certain political decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg has faced less friction when making sweeping policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg's overtures 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 and blood running down his face “one of the sickest things I've ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg penned a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta's teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.
“I believe the government’s pressure was wrong and I regret that we have not been more open about it,” he wrote.
After Trump's presidential victory, Zuckerberg visited the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida along with several other technology executives. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund.
On Friday, Meta told its staff in a memo obtained by CNBC that it plans to end several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, marking another pro-Trump move.
The day before, news site The Intercept published some details about the company's new, relaxed content moderation policies, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta's new policy would now allow, including statements like “Migrants are no better than vomit.” and “I bet Jorge is the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves.”
Realignment for Trump
Zuckerberg, who was dragged to Washington to testify before congressional committees eight times during the last two administrations, wants to be seen as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.
Although Meta's content policy updates surprised many of its employees and fact-checking partners, a small group of executives formulated the plans following the results of the US election. On New Year's Day, leadership began planning public announcements of its policy change, the people said.
Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after key U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director and CEO of technology consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country experiences a transition of power, Meta adjusts its policies according to the political landscape to best suit their business and reputational needs, Harbath said.
“In 2028 they will recalibrate again,” she said.
For example, after the 2016 election and Trump's first victory, Zuckerberg traveled across the United States to meet people in states he had not previously visited. He released a 6,000-word manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.
The social media company faced intense criticism over fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
After the 2020 election, in the midst of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on Covid-19 content, with one political official saying in 2021 that “the amount of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines that violates our policies violated, is too high according to our standards”. .” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but they have drawn the ire of Republicans.
Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.
“Here in Silicon Valley there was no business risk in moving more to the right,” said Harbath.
While Trump has made few concrete policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has a lot at stake.
The White House could create looser AI regulations compared to those in the European Union, where Meta said strict restrictions have prevented the company from bringing some of its more advanced AI technologies to market. Like other tech giants, Meta also requires larger data centers and state-of-the-art computer chips to train and run its advanced AI models.
“There is a business advantage if Republicans win because they are traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts to his testimony during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta isn't the only one trying to get used to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflect the particular hostility that Trump has expressed over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship and expressed displeasure with 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 Truth Social that he intended to “go after election fraudsters on an unprecedented scale and put them in prison for a long time,” adding, “ZUGERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump repeated this statement in his book “Save America,” writing that Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO “would spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.
According to the company's 2024 proxy statement, Meta spends $14 million annually on the personal security of Zuckerberg and his family. As part of that security, the company is analyzing any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. These threats are cataloged, analyzed and analyzed by Meta's numerous security teams.
After Trump's comments, Meta's security teams analyzed how Trump could use the Justice Department and the country's intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be identified for this reason Confidentiality.
Meta's efforts to appease the new 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 used Meta's Threads service to tell their followers that they were leaving Facebook.
“Last post before deletion,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before the post could be seen by any of his Threads followers, Meta's content moderation system deleted it, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn't help but laugh at the situation.
“This is deeply ironic,” Boland said.
—CNBC's Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
REGARD: Meta returns to the tradition of free speech, says Chris Kelly, Facebook's former chief privacy officer
Comments are closed.