Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who know his way of thinking small.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg convened several policy and communications leaders last month to discuss the company's approach to online speech. He had decided to make fundamental changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to reflect these changes in policy.
Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his hand-picked team debated how to do it in Zoom meetings, conference calls, and late-night group chats. While some subordinates skip family dinners and holiday gatherings to work, Mr. Zuckerberg weighed in between his home in the San Francisco Bay Area and a trip to Kauai.
Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to make the changes public by New Year's Day, according to four current and former Meta employees and advisers with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions. It is said that
The whole process was very unusual. Meta typically invites employees, civic leaders, and others to make changes to the policies that govern its apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Changes typically take several months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a six-week sprint that blindsided even employees on the 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 was overhauling speech on its apps by loosening restrictions on how people can talk about controversial social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. The company announced it would discontinue its fact-checking program, which was meant to curb misinformation, and instead rely on users to police falsehoods. And he said he would insert more political content into people's feeds, after previously de-emphasizing it.
In the days since, the move, which has far-reaching implications for what people see online, drew applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives and derision from fact-checking groups and misinformation researchers. There have been concerns from LGBTQ advocacy groups concerned about the impact of this change. More and more people are experiencing harassment both online and offline.
Reactions within the meta are widely divided. While some employees celebrated the move, others were shocked and publicly condemned the change on company bulletin boards. Several employees wrote that they were embarrassed to work at Meta.
On Friday, Meta told employees it was ending its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, but Meta's transformation continued. The company said it would eliminate the role of chief diversity officer, end its diversity hiring goal of hiring a certain number of women and minorities, and no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring vendors.
Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post relayed to the New York Times that Meta is “developing fair and consistent practices that reduce bias for all people, regardless of their background.” “We plan to focus on how to apply it to the world,'' he said.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and Mr. Zuckerberg's advisers described Mr. Zuckerberg's shift as serving a dual purpose. Mr. Mehta is positioned in the current political climate in Washington, where Mr. Trump was inaugurated as president on January 20 and conservatives have become dominant. More than that, the changes reflect Zuckerberg's personal views on how the $1.5 trillion company should be run. And he no longer wants to keep these opinions silent.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, regularly discusses concerns that progressives are cracking down on speech with friends and colleagues, including venture capitalist and Meta director Marc Andreessen, people familiar with the matter said. It is said that there is. He also feels beleaguered by what he sees as the Biden administration's anti-technology stance, and has been stung by what he sees as the media and Silicon Valley progressives (including Mehta's workforce) in cracking down on speech. They feel encouraged to take a hard line. , they said.
Mehta declined to comment.
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg said it was time to “get back to our original mission” by giving people “the power to share.” He said he feels pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding, “I now have more authority over what policy should be. This is our future policy,” he added.
The recent changes were prompted by Trump's victory in November. That same month, Mr. Zuckerberg flew to Florida and met with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Mehta later donated $1 million to the president-elect's inaugural fund.
At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg began preparing to change speech policy. Knowing that any move would be controversial, he assembled a team of about a dozen aides and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy chief with strong Republican ties. Kevin Martin, head of U.S. policy; and communications director David Ginsburg. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted there was no leak, according to a person familiar with the effort.
The group, spearheaded by Zuckerberg, was said to be working to review Meta's “hate speech” policies. They renamed the policy for responding to defamation, threats against protected groups, and other harmful content on the app to “hateful conduct.”
This effectively shifted the focus of the rules from speech and minimized the meta's role in policing online conversation. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were cheerleaders for change, officials said.
Mr. Zuckerberg appointed Mr. Kaplan to Meta's role as successor to former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who was in charge of global policy and regulatory issues, to implement change and deepen Meta's relationship with the incoming Trump administration. The decision was made to promote him to the position of director of international public policy. The night before Meta's announcement, Mr. Kaplan held separate phone calls with top conservative social media influencers, two people familiar with the matter said.
Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy in an Instagram video on Tuesday. Mr. Kaplan appeared on Mr. Trump's media mainstay, “Fox & Friends,” and said Mr. Mehta's fact-checking partner had “too much political bias.”
(The fact-checking group that worked with Meta said it had no role in determining what Meta did with fact-checked content.)
Among its changes, Meta relaxed its rules to allow people to post statements that they hate people of a particular race, religion, or sexual orientation, and included the following: It also included allowing “claims of disease or abnormality.” The company cited political discourse around transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that prohibited users from saying that certain races are responsible for the spread of coronavirus.
Some training materials created by Meta for the new policy contained confusing and contradictory content, said two employees who reviewed the materials. Part of the text states that people will not be allowed to say on Facebook that “white people have mental illness,” but they will be allowed to say “gay people have mental illness.” It is said that it was written.
Meta locked access to policy and training materials internally late Thursday, hours after The Intercept published excerpts, they said.
The company also removed transgender and non-binary “themes” on its Messenger chat app that allowed users to customize the app's colors and wallpaper, two employees said. 404 Media previously reported on this change.
On the same day, facility managers at Meta's offices in Silicon Valley, Texas, and New York were told to remove tampons from men's restrooms. The company had tampons available for non-binary and transgender employees who use men's restrooms and may need sanitary pads. the employee said.
Some employees were angry at executives' efforts to hide changes to the Hateful Conduct policy before they were announced, two people said. Typically, policy staff view and comment on important revisions, but in this case, most did not have the opportunity to do so.
At Workplace, Meta's Slack-like internal communications software, employees began discussing the change. In the @Pride employee resource group, where employees support LGBTQ issues, at least one person announced his resignation and two others said they had privately communicated that they planned to look for work elsewhere. Ta.
Alex Schultz, Meta's chief marketing officer, defended Zuckerberg in a post on the @Pride group this week, saying topics like transgender issues have become politicized. He said meta policies should not get in the way of enabling social debate and cited the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade in the 1970s as an example of “the court getting ahead of society.” Ta. Schultz said the court “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be discussed civilly.
“We find that topics become politicized and remain in the political conversation much longer than if society simply discussed them and eliminated them,” Schultz wrote. He said this type of discussion would be possible if speech restrictions within meta apps were relaxed.
Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, this week and is said to have been at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, according to four people familiar with his activities.
In his interview with Rogan, Zuckerberg denied making any sweeping changes to appease the incoming Trump administration, but said the election had certainly influenced his thinking.
“The good thing about doing this after the election is you can feel the pulse of this culture,” he says. “We have reached a point where there are things that are not just mainstream discourse.”
Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.
