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Mark Zuckerberg message this week that Meta to reverse its moderation policy to allow more “free speech,” was seen by many as the company’s latest attempt to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of its Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken a number of public steps to atone for Trump since his election victory in November.
This follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook, along with other social media companies, banning Trump from using its platform.
Back in March, Trump was there using his preferred nickname is “Zuckershmuck” when referring to the CEO of Meta and declaring that Facebook was “the enemy of the people.”
Now Meta is positioning itself to be a key player in the field of artificial intelligenceZuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to realize its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. .
“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it 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 an announcement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said Meta will end third-party fact-checking, lift restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity, and bring political content back to users’ channels. Zuckerberg cited the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing the Meta content moderation apparatus that he is said “have reached a point where there are too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The policy shift is the latest strategic shift Meta has made to befriend Trump and Republicans after Election Day.
the day before Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump, is joining the company’s board.
And last week, Meta announced that it did replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, and Joel Kaplan, who was the company’s 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 chief of staff at the White House under former president George W. Bush.
Kaplan, who joined Meta in 2011 when it was still known as Facebook, has longstanding ties to the Republican Party and once clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December Kaplan placed photos on Facebook of him with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump during them visiting on the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | PA Images | Getty Images
Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, some say the company is abdicating its responsibility to build a secure platform. Current and former staff have also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more abuse online because of the new policy, which is due to come into force in the coming weeks.
Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make such moves after lay off 21,000 employeesor nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
These cuts affected a large part of Meta civic integrity, trust and security groups. Former employees said the civic integrity group was the closest thing to a white-collar union whose members were willing to oppose certain policy decisions. People say that after the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction in making sweeping policy changes.
Zuckerberg’s appeals to Trump began several months before the election.
After the first attempt to assassinate Trump in July, Zuckerberg named a photo of Trump raising his fist with blood running down his face, “one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
in a month Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, alleging that the Biden administration pressured Meta teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.
“I believe the pressure from the government was misguided, and I wish we had been more open about it,” he wrote.
After Trump won the presidential election, Zuckerberg joined several other tech executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta too donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
On Friday, Meta is revealed to its workforce The memo, obtained by CNBC, said he intends to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in the hiring process, another Trump-friendly move.
Some details of the company’s new relaxed guidelines for content moderation were released earlier in the day published news site The Intercept, displaying the kind of offensive rhetoric that the new Meta policy now allows, including statements like “Migrants are no better than puke” and “I bet Jorge stole my backpack today after training at track”. Immigrants are all thieves.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been hauled to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the past two administrations, wants to be seen as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.
While updates to Meta’s content policy caught many of its staff and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives had been making plans following the US election results. Management began planning public announcements about the policy change before the New Year, the people said.
Meta typically undergoes a major “recalibration” after a high-profile U.S. election, said Kathy Harbutt, Facebook’s former director of policy and CEO of consulting firm Anchor Change. When a country changes power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit business and reputational needs depending on the political landscape, Harbat said.
“In 2028, they will recalibrate,” she said.
For example, after the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, Zuckerberg toured the United States to meet with people in states he had not visited before. He published 6,000 words manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build a larger community.
The social media company has faced fierce criticism over fake news and Russian election meddling on its platforms since the 2016 election.
After the 2020 election, at the height of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on Covid-19 content with policy chief saying in 2021 that “the amount of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine that violates our policy is too great by our standards.” The effort may have appeased the Biden administration, but it has angered Republicans.
Meta is again reacting to the moment, Harbat said.
“Here in Silicon Valley, there was no risk of being more right-wing,” Harbutt said.
While Trump has offered few concrete policy proposals for his second administration, Metta has a lot at stake.
The White House could create softer AI rules than those in the European Union, where Meta is based says tight restrictions meant that the company did not release some of them more advanced artificial intelligence technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, too needs more massive data centers and advanced computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There’s a benefit to business in a Republican victory because they’ve traditionally regulated less,” Harbutt said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts during testimony during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the US Capitol in Washington, US on January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hochstein | Reuters
Meta is not alone in trying to approach Trump. But the extreme measures the campaign is taking reflect a particular level of hostility that Trump has expressed over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship and expressed anger over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In July 2024, Trump published on Truth Social that he intended to “go after election fraud on an unprecedented scale and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time”, adding “ZUCKERBUCKS beware!” Trump repeated this statement in his book Save America, writing that Zuckerberg was plotting against him during the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.
Meta spends $14 million annually on personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, the company said in a statement in 2024. As part of that security, the company analyzes 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 many security teams.
After Trump’s comments, Meta Security analyzed how Trump could use the Justice Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to protect its CEO from the sitting president, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of privacy concerns.
Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president carry their risks.
After Zuckerberg announced the new speaking policy on Tuesday, Boland, a former executive, was among a number of users who took to the Meta Threads service to tell their followers they were leaving Facebook.
“Last message before deletion,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before any of his Threads subscribers could see the post, content moderation system Meta removed it, citing cybersecurity concerns.
In an interview with CNBC, Boland said he couldn’t help but smile at the situation.
“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
