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Meta is reportedly reducing internal criticism of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement Monday that Dana White would be added to its board of directors. 404 Average reported about deleting comments that employees leave on Workplace, an internal version of Facebook accessible to employees. Some of the comments highlighted video footage from 2022 showing White, a staunch Trump supporter and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, slapping his wife at a New Year’s Eve party. He was never charged for the altercation.
According to 404some employees expressed excitement about the appointment or made joking comments. One employee, for example, wrote “W” while another wrote: “We hired Connor (McGregor) later for sparring after work?” Connor McGregor, a UFC fighter, was found guilty of sexual assault by a civil court after a woman accused him of rape in 2018.
Others were disappointed by Meta’s decision and colleagues’ celebratory comments. “Kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape,” said one employee. “I can excuse individuals for not being aware, but Meta definitely did his due diligence on the white and concluded that what he did is right. I feel like I’m on another planet.”
Tech giants like Meta and Google were famous in their early days for allowing free internal discussions and dissent, believing it would make them a pleasant place to work and lead to better product decisions. But as these companies have metastasized into companies around the world with hundreds of thousands of employees, they have largely restricted open discussion or employee protests. High profile controversies such as the anti-diversity memo written by a former Google employee caused a lot of internal havoc and leadership teams across the industry eventually threw up their hands.
In removing White’s comments, a member of Meta’s “Internal Community Relations” team explained to employees that they violated the company’s internal rules for discussion, called “Community Engagement Expectations.” “I am posting a comment here with a reminder about the CEE, since many comments have been reported by the community for review. It is important that we maintain a respectful work environment where people can do their best work. We need to maintain keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community, including members of our Board. Insulting, criticizing or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the EEC”.
Meta’s communications team stressed 404 that the company has always had different rules for discussions internally and those that happen on its platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
Since winning re-election, Zuckerberg has been on a full-court press to please Trump, starting with a Donation of $1 million he did at his inauguration.
After White’s appointment on Monday, Zuckerberg today made a series of announcements regarding content moderation in a video that can best be described as a masterclass in political theater. The announcements include that Meta will abandon its fact-checking apparatus in favor of an X-style community notes system; leave a small moderation team in place that it would be moved from California to Texas “to eliminate bias”; allow political content on Facebook and Instagram again after suppression in recent years; and lifting restrictions on content relevant to the discussion of gender and immigration.
On this last point, Meta has updated its community guidelines to allow it “Allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given the political and religious discourse on transgenderism and homosexuality.” In essence, it is now okay to suggest that homosexuality is attributable to mental illness.
In addition to the concerns about misinformation and abuse posed by these changes, critics point out that Meta’s algorithms over-optimize in promoting rage-inducing content that gains high engagement. Opaque algorithms are undoubtedly themselves a form of censorship – on X, Elon Musk regularly uses the algorithm to raise any type of content he wants to see and suppress what he doesn’t like.
Taken together, Zuckerberg’s moves kill two birds with one stone. He has long despised being in the position to moderate the content on his platforms, and now he can stop doing it. And it can simultaneously appease Trump, who under his first administration threatened lock Zuckerberg up for the rest of his life for its moderation of conservative content. But working to please conservatives and appease Trump, he will have to deal with unrest among the more liberal employees in his workforce.
Trump was asked about Zuckerberg’s decision to loosen content restrictions during a Mar-a-Lago press conference on Tuesday. After a reporter asked if Trump believed Zuckerberg was making the changes in response to his earlier threats, Trump answered“probably”.
We mentioned a big antitrust case against Meta went to court in April? Trump could spare Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, many public grills under oath.
