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by Mark Zuckerberg announcement this week that Meta pivoting its moderation policies to allow more “free expression” was widely seen as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of his Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.
That follows four highly contentious years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook — similar to other social media companies — banning Trump from its platform.
As of March, Trump was use his favorite nickname of “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about the CEO of Meta and declare that Facebook was an “enemy of the people”.
With Meta now it is positioned to be a key player in artificial intelligenceZuckerberg recognizes the need for support from the White House as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow him to realize his lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be identified. appointed because they were not authorized to speak. on the matter.
“Even if Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still has to kneel to Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former vice president of Facebook, who left the company in 2020.
Meta declined to comment for this article.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta ends third-party fact-checking, removes restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity and brings political content back to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg presented the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content moderation apparatus, which he he said had “reached a point where there are just too many mistakes and too much censorship”.
The policy shift was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to befriend Trump and Republicans since Election Day.
A 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 was to replace Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s vice president of policy. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrat party, including as deputy prime minister, while Kaplan was a deputy White House chief of staff 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 worked as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan published photos on Facebook of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during his visit at the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, on April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | PA Images | Getty Images
Many employees Meta criticized the change in policy internally, with some saying that the company is absolved of its responsibility to create a secure platform. Current and former employees have also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more abuse online as a result of the new policy, which is due to take effect in the coming weeks.
Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make these types of moves later. layoff of 21,000 employeesor almost a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Those cuts affected a lot of Meta civic integrity and trust and security teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to push back against certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making broad policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg’s openness to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.
After Trump’s first assassination attempt in July, Zuckerberg named Trump’s photo raising his fist with blood streaming down his face “one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that says the Biden administration had pressured Meta teams to censor some Covid-19 content.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I’m sorry we weren’t more forthright,” he wrote.
After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined many other tech leaders who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta as well donated $1 million at Trump’s inaugural fund.
Friday, Meta revealed to their workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that he intends to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in his hiring process, representing another move favored by Trump.
The previous day, some details of the company’s new relaxed content moderation guidelines were published from the news site The Intercept, which shows the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy now allows, 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.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the past two administrations, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said. .
Although Meta’s content policy updates took many of its employees and fellow fact-checkers by surprise, a small group of executives formulated the plans after the US election results. On New Year’s Day, the leadership began planning public announcements of its policy change, the people said.
Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after prominent U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director and CEO of technology consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.
“In 2028, they will recalibrate again,” he said.
After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg visited the United States to meet people in states he had not visited before. He published a word of 6,000 manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more communities.
The social media company faced harsh criticism over fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
After the 2020 elections, during the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on the Covid-19 content, with a policy executive. saying in 2021 that the “amount of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine that violates our policies is too much for our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but they have drawn the ire of Republicans.
The goal is to react to the moment, Harbath said.
“There was no business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-leaning,” Harbath said.
While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has a lot at stake.
The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations compared to those in the European Union, where Meta he says strict restrictions have caused the company not to release some of its own more advanced AI technology. Meta, like other tech giants, too needs more massive data centers and state-of-the-art computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There’s a business benefit to having the Republicans win, because they’re traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts as he testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the US Capitol in Washington, US on January 31 in 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein Reuters
Meta is not alone in trying to consult Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflect a particular level of animus expressed by Trump over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship and expressed resentment over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In July 2024, Trump published on Social Truth that he intended to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and that they will be sent to prison for long periods of time”, adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, beware!” Trump repeat this statement in his book, “Save America”, writing that Zuckerberg conspired against him during the 2020 election and that the CEO of Meta “will spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened to again
Meta spends $14 million annually to provide personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threat or perceived threat against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. These threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s multitude of security teams.
After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could arm the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against to a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.
Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming 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 took to the Threads Meta service to tell their followers they were leaving Facebook.
“Last post before deleting,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before the post could be seen by any of his Threads followers, Meta’s content moderation system had taken it down, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but laugh at the situation.
“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
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