Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, sat down with a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company's approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to translate those changes into policy.
Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his hand-picked team how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates fled family dinners and holiday gatherings to go to work, as Mr. Zuckerberg juggled trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the island of Kauai.
On New Year's Day, Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to make the changes public, according to four current and former Meta employees and advisers with knowledge of the events, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential conversations.
The whole process was highly unusual. Meta typically changes the policies that apply to its apps – including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads – by inviting employees, community leaders and others to weigh in. Each shift typically takes months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned his latest effort into a six-week sprint, even blinding employees to his policy and integrity teams.
On Tuesday, most of Meta's 72,000 employees, along with the rest of the world, learned of Mr. Zuckerberg's plans. The Silicon Valley giant said it was overhauling speech on its apps by easing restrictions on the way people can talk about controversial social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. The company ended its fact-checking program aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to check falsehoods. And it said it would insert more political content into people's feeds after previously de-emphasizing that same material.
In the days since, these measures — which have far-reaching implications for what people will see online — have drawn applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives, ridicule from fact-checking groups and disinformation researchers, and concerns from LGBTQ advocacy groups who fear the changes will until more people are harassed online and offline.
Within Meta the reactions are sharply divided. Some employees have welcomed the measures, while others have expressed shock and openly denounced the changes on the company's internal message boards. Several employees wrote that they were ashamed to work for Meta.
Meta's makeover continued on Friday when the company told employees it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated the role of chief diversity officer, ended diversity hiring goals that called for the employment of a certain number of women and minorities, and said it would no longer prioritize minority-owned companies in hiring suppliers.
Meta planned to “focus on implementing fair and consistent practices that reduce bias for everyone, regardless of your background,” Janelle Gale, vice president of HR, said in an internal post passed to The New York Times .
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisers to Mr. Zuckerberg described his move as serving a dual purpose. It positions Meta for today's political landscape, with a rising conservative force in Washington as Mr Trump takes power on January 20. What's more, the changes reflect Mr. Zuckerberg's personal views on how his $1.5 trillion company should be run — and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, has spoken regularly with friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are controlling speech, the people said. He also felt stymied by what he sees as the Biden administration's anti-tech stance, and stung by what he sees as progressives in the media and in Silicon Valley – including in Meta's workforce – pushing him to take a tough into the police discourse. , they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was time to “get back to our original mission” by giving people “the power to share.” He said he felt pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding: “I now have much greater control over what I think the policy should be, and this is how things will continue.”
The latest changes were prompted by Trump's victory in November. That month, Mr. Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the president-elect's inaugural fund.
At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg began preparing to change the speech policy. Knowing any move would be controversial, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy aide with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, head of US policy; and David Ginsberg, chief communications officer. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted there would be no leaks, the people with knowledge of the effort said.
The group was working on the review of Meta's 'Hate Speech' policy, with Mr Zuckerberg leading the charge, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which outlines what to do about insults, threats against protected groups, and other harmful content on their apps, to “Hateful conduct.”
That effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from the speech, minimizing Meta's role in monitoring online conversations. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were in favor of the changes, these people said.
Mr Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr Kaplan to Meta's head of global public policy to implement the changes and deepen Meta's ties with the new Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain who had handled policy and regulatory issues globally for Meta since 2018. The night before Meta's announcement, Mr. Kaplan held one-on-one conversations with the most conservative social media influencers, two people said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg made the new speech policy public in his Instagram video. Appearing on “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of Mr. Trump’s media diet, Mr. Kaplan said Meta’s fact-checking partners “had too much political bias.”
(Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content it fact-checked.)
Among the changes, Meta relaxed the rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions, or sexual orientations, including allowing “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” For a change, the company cited the political discourse on transgender rights. It also removed a rule that banned users from saying people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.
Some of the training materials Meta created for the new policy were confusing and contradictory, said two employees who reviewed the documents. Some of the text stated that saying “white people have mental illness” would be prohibited on Facebook, but that saying “gay people have mental illness” would be allowed, they said.
Meta shut down access to the policy and training materials internally late Thursday, they said, hours after The Intercept published excerpts.
The company also removed transgender and non-binary “themes” from the Messenger chat app, which let users customize the app's colors and background, two employees said. 404 Media previously reported on the change.
That same day, facility managers at Meta's offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York were instructed to remove tampons from the men's restrooms, which the company had made available to non-binary and transgender employees who use the men's restrooms and who may need sanitary pads had. employees said.
Some employees were outraged by what they saw as attempts by executives to hide changes to the “hateful conduct” policy before it was announced, two people said. Although people within the policy department usually review and comment on important revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.
On Workplace, Meta's Slack-like internal communications software, employees began discussing the changes. At the @Pride employee group, where employees who support LGBTQ issues gather, at least one person has announced his resignation, while others privately told each other they planned to look for work elsewhere, two people said.
In a message this week to the @Pride group, Meta Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz defended Mr Zuckerberg, saying topics such as transgender issues had become politicized. He said Meta's policies should not get in the way of civil debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of “courts leading the way for society” in the 1970s. Mr Schultz said the courts were “politicizing” the issue rather than allowing it to be debated socially.
“You notice that topics become politicized and remain in the political conversation for much longer than if society were simply debating them,” Mr. Schultz wrote. He said looser restrictions on speech in Meta's apps would allow for this kind of debate.
Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, this week, four people with knowledge of his activities said, and was reported to have been at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.
In his interview with Mr. Rogan, Mr. Zuckerberg denied that he had made sweeping changes to appease the new Trump administration, but said the election did influence his thinking.
“The good thing about doing it after the election is you can feel this cultural momentum,” he said. “We got to a point where there were things you couldn't say that were just mainstream discourse.”
Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman And Jonathan Swan reporting contributed.
