Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, invited 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 President-elect Donald J. Trump visited Mar-a-Lago for Thanksgiving. Now he needed his officials to translate these changes into policy.
In the following weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his select team discussed how to do this in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holidays to work, while Mr. Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the island of Kauai.
By the New Year, Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to make the changes public, according to four current and former Meta employees and advisers with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions.
The whole process was very unusual. Meta routinely changes the policies governing its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, political leaders and others to weigh in. Any changes generally take months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closed six-week sprint, blindside even employees in his policy and integrity teams.
On Tuesday, most of Meta’s 72,000 employees learned of Mr. Zuckerberg along with the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant said it is overhauling speech on its apps by loosening restrictions on how people can talk about contentious social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. He killed the fact-checking program aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would rely on users to police lies. And it said it would introduce more political content into people’s feeds, after previously toning down that very material.
In the days since, the moves – which have sweeping implications for what people will see online – have drawn applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives, derision from fact-checking groups and disinformation researchers, and concerns from LGBTQ advocacy groups who fear the changes will lead to more people being harassed online and offline.
Within the Meta, reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees celebrated the moves, while others were shocked and openly criticized the changes on internal company message boards. Several employees wrote that they were embarrassed to work at Meta.
On Friday, Meta’s transformation continued when the company told employees it would end its diversity, equity and inclusion work. He eliminated the role of chief diversity officer, ended diversity hiring goals that required a certain number of women and minorities to be employed, and said he would no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring salespeople.
Meta planned to “focus on how to implement fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for everyone, regardless of your background,” Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post shared with the New York Times.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisers to Mr. Zuckerberg described his shift as serving a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the political landscape of the moment, with the conservative ascendant in Washington as Mr. Trump takes office on January 20. In addition, the changes reflect the personal views of Mr. Zuckerberg on how his $1.5 trillion company should be run — and he doesn’t want to keep those opinions quiet anymore.
The 40-year-old Mr. Zuckerberg has spoken regularly with friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, Meta’s venture capitalist and board member, about concerns that progressives are policing the discourse, the people said. He has also felt railroaded by what he sees as the anti-tech stance of the Biden administration and stung by what he sees as progressives in the media and Silicon Valley — including Meta’s workforce — pushing him to take a heavy hand in policing discourse. , they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was time to return “to our original mission” of giving people “the power to share.” He said he felt pressure from the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding: “I have a lot more knowledge now of what I think the policy should be and that’s how it’s going to go.”
The latest changes were catalyzed by the victory of Mr. Trump in November. That month, Mr. Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet with 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 policies. Knowing that any moves would be controversial, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy operative with strong ties to the Republican Party. Kevin Martin, chief of US policy; and David Ginsberg, chief of communications. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted there would be no leaks, the people familiar with the effort said.
The team worked on revising Meta’s “Hate Speech” policy, with Mr. Zuckerberg to lead the charge, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which sets out what to do with insults, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to “Hateful Conduct”.
This effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from speech, minimizing the Meta’s role in policing online conversation. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were the cheerleaders for change, these people said.
Mr. Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr. Kaplan to Meta’s head of global public policy to effect the changes and deepen Meta’s ties to the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister who had handled global policy and regulatory affairs. for Meta since 2018. The night before the Meta announcement, Mr. Kaplan held one-on-one calls with top conservative social media influencers, two of the people said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced the new speech policies in his Instagram video. Mr. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a staple of Mr. Trump, saying Meta’s fact-checking partners “had too much political bias.”
(Diagnostic groups that worked with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the censored content.)
Among its changes, Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hate people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including allowing “complaints of mental illness or abnormality based on gender or sexual orientation” . The company cited the political rationale of transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that prohibited users from saying that people of certain races were responsible for the spread of the coronavirus.
Some training materials Meta created on the new policies were confusing and contradictory, said two employees who reviewed the documents. Some of the text said the phrase “white people have mental illness” would be banned on Facebook, but “gay people have mental illness” would be allowed, they said.
Meta locked down access to the policies and training materials internally late Thursday, they said, hours after The Intercept published excerpts.
The company also removed trans and non-binary “themes” on its Messenger chat app, which allows users to customize the app’s colors and wallpaper, two employees said. 404 Media reported earlier on the change.
On the same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas, and New York, facility managers were ordered to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for non-binary and transgender employees using the men’s room and who may have needed sanitary napkins. said the workers.
Some employees were upset with what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before it was announced, two of the people said. While people across the policy department usually see and comment on major revisions, most didn’t get the chance this time.
At Workplace, Meta’s Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing over the changes. At the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support LGBTQ issues meet, at least one person announced his resignation as others communicated privately that they planned to look for work elsewhere, two people said.
In a post this week on the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, defended Mr. Zuckerberg and said issues like transgender issues have become politicized. He said Metta’s policies should not impede social debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of “courts coming before society” in the 1970s. Schultz said the courts have “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be discussed in a civil manner.
“You find that issues are politicized and stay in the political debate for much longer than they would be if society were just discussing them,” wrote Mr. Schultz. He said looser restrictions on speech in Meta’s apps would allow this kind of discussion.
Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Florida this week, four people with knowledge of his activities said, and on Friday was said to be at Mar-a-Lago.
In his interview with Mr. Rogan, Mr. Zuckerberg denied making sweeping changes to appease the incoming Trump administration, but said the election did influence his thinking.
“The good thing about doing it after the election is you get that cultural pulse,” he said. “We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn’t say were just mainstream speech.”
Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed to the report.
