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Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that dead Its moderate policies to allow more “free speech” were widely seen as the company's latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of its Silicon Valley counterparts, Meta has taken several public steps to make up for Trump since he won the election in November.
This comes after 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.
Last March, Trump was using his preferred nickname, “Zuckerschmuck,” when talking about the CEO of Meta and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”
With Meta now positioned to be a major player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to achieve its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company's plans who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. In this regard.
“As powerful as Facebook is, it still has to kneel before Trump,” said Brian Bolland, 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 would end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity and return political content to users' feeds. Zuckerberg described the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta's content moderation apparatus, which he said has “reached a point where there's a lot of bugs and a lot of oversight.”
The policy change was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to engage with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.
A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump, would join the company's board of directors.
Last week, Meta announced that it would replace Nick Clegg, its head of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who was the company's vice president of policy. Clegg previously worked 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 it was still known as Facebook, has long-standing ties to the Republican Party and once served 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 J.D. Vance and Trump during their visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president of global policy, April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | Photos of the Palestinian Authority | Getty Images
Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, with some saying the company was absolving itself of its responsibility to create a secure platform. Current and former employees have also expressed concern that marginalized communities may face more online abuse due to the new policy, which is set to take effect in the coming weeks.
Despite the backlash from employees, Meta is more prepared to make that kind of move after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023, people familiar with the company's thinking said.
These cuts impact many of Meta's Civic Integrity, Trust, and Safety teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a union for administrative employees, where members were willing to back down on certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making broad policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg's overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.
After Trump's first assassination attempt in July, Zuckerberg described the image of Trump raising his fist with blood streaming down his face as “one of the most vicious things I've ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration pressured meta teams to censor some COVID-19 content.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more upfront about it,” he wrote.
After Trump won the presidency, Zuckerberg joined several other technology executives who visited the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund.
On Friday, Meta revealed to its workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in the hiring process, marking another Trump-friendly move.
The day before, some details about the company's new relaxed content moderation guidelines were published by news site The Intercept, showing what kind of offensive speech Meta's new policy will now allow, including phrases like “immigrants are no better than vomit.” “I bet Jorge stole my bag after training today. Immigrants are all thieves.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees 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 caught many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives have been formulating plans in the wake of the US election results. By New Year's Day, the leadership began planning public announcements of its policy change, the people said.
Katie Harbath, a former policy director at Facebook and CEO of technology consulting firm Anchor Change, said meta typically undergoes significant “recalibration” after high-profile US elections. When a country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best fit its business and reputation needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.
“In 2028, they will recalibrate again,” she said.
After the 2016 election and Trump's first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the United States to meet people in states he had never visited before. He published a 6,000-word statement emphasizing Facebook's need to build more community.
The social media company faced heavy criticism over fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
After the 2020 election, in the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on COVID-19 content, with one policy executive saying in 2021 that “the amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too great by our standards.” These efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but they have drawn the ire of Republicans.
Harbath said that Mita is once again reacting to this moment.
“There was no business risk here in Silicon Valley in being more right-leaning,” Harbath said.
Although Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has a lot at stake.
The White House could create looser AI regulations than those in the European Union, where Meta says strict restrictions have led to the company not launching some of its more advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, also needs more massive data centers and cutting-edge computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There is a business benefit from a Republican victory, because they are traditionally less organized,” 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, January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hochstein | Reuters
Meta is not alone in trying to get closer to Trump. But the company's extreme actions reflect a certain level of hostility that Trump has expressed over the years.
Trump accused Meta of censorship and expressed his dissatisfaction with the company's suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts for two years after the January 6 attack on the Capitol building.
In July 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social that he intended to “go after election fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding, “Zuckerbucks, be careful!” Trump repeated this statement in his book “Save America,” where he wrote that Zuckerberg conspired 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 providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company's 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company is analyzing any perceived threats or threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. These threats are classified, analyzed and dissected by several Meta security teams.
After Trump's comments, Meta's security teams analyzed how Trump could weaponize 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 requested anonymity due to confidentiality.
Meta's efforts to appease the next president carry their own risks.
After Zuckerberg announced the new expression policy on Tuesday, Poland, the former CEO, was among a number of users who took to Meta's Threads service to tell their followers that they were leaving Facebook.
“Last post before deletion,” Boland wrote in his message.
Before any Threads followers could see the post, Meta's content moderation system removed it, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn't help but laugh at the situation.
“It's absolutely ridiculous,” Boland said.
— CNBC's Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
Watch: Meta returns to the tradition of free speech, says Chris Kelly, Facebook's former chief privacy officer
