Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s sprint to remake Trump-era Meta | Technology News

Last month, Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, contacted a number of policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to the Internet. He decided to make drastic changes after visiting President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida during Thanksgiving. Now he needed his staff to turn those changes into policy.

Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his hand-picked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group discussions. Other subordinates have stolen family dinners and holiday gatherings to go to work while Zuckerberg balances between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

By New Year’s Day, Zuckerberg was ready to go public with the changes, 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 discussions.

The whole process was very unusual. Meta regularly changes the policies governing its apps – which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads – by inviting employees, community leaders and others to review. Any shifts usually last months. But Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsided even by staff on his policy and integrity teams.

On Tuesday, most of Meta’s 72,000 employees learned about Zuckerberg’s plans and the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant has said it is reforming discourse through its apps by loosening the boundaries of how people can talk about public issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking system that was meant to curb fake news and said it would instead rely on users to police lies. And it said it would add more political content to people’s food after de-emphasizing that content.

In the days since, the move — which largely affects what people will see online — has drawn applause from Trump and conservatives, criticism from President Joe Biden, derision from fact-checking groups and disinformation researchers, and concerns from LGBTQ+ rights groups that fear the changes will lead to more people being victimized online and offline.

Within Meta, the reaction is very divided. Some employees are happy with the move, while others are shocked and have gone public to criticize the changes on the company’s internal message boards. Many employees wrote that they are ashamed to work for Meta.

On Friday, Meta’s overhaul continued when the company told employees it would end its diversity, equity and inclusion program. It ended its role as a diversity officer, ended its various hiring targets that wanted a certain number of women and minorities to be hired, and said it would no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring salespeople.

Meta plans to “focus on implementing fair and consistent practices that reduce bias for all people, regardless of where they come from,” said Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, in an internal email forwarded to the New York Times.

At the White House on Friday, Biden told reporters that Zuckerberg’s decision to stop fact-checking Facebook and Instagram was “disgraceful.”

In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, managers and Zuckerberg advisers described his replacement as serving a dual purpose. Putting Meta in the current political environment, conservative forces are rising in Washington as Trump takes office Jan. 20. In addition, the changes reflect Zuckerberg’s personal views on how his $1.5 trillion company should be run – and he no longer wants to. to keep those ideas quiet.

Zuckerberg, 40, has been talking to friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that the move is police talk, the people said. He also felt frustrated by what he saw as the Biden administration’s anti-tech stance, and angered by what he saw as a growing media and Silicon Valley — including Meta staff — pressuring him to play a larger role in policing discourse, they said.

Meta declined to comment.

In an interview with host Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg said it’s time to “get back to our original mission” of giving people “the power to share.” He said he felt pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding, “I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and this is the way forward.”

The latest changes were caused by Trump’s victory in November. That month, Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the president’s foundation fund.

At Meta, Zuckerberg began preparing to change speech policies. Knowing that any move would be controversial, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy official with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, head of US policy; and David Ginsberg, head of communications. Zuckerberg insisted there were no leaks, people with knowledge of the effort said.

The group worked on revising Meta’s “Hate Speech” policy, with Zuckerberg leading the way, they said. They changed the wording of the policy, which spells out what to do with profanity, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to “Hateful Conduct.”

That effectively de-emphasized the rules on speech, reducing Meta’s role in policing the internet conversation. Kaplan and Martin were transformational leaders, the people said.

Zuckerberg decided to promote Kaplan as Meta’s head of global public policy to make changes and deepen Meta’s relationship with the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister who was in charge of Meta’s global policy and regulatory affairs since 2018. The night before the Meta announcement, Kaplan held calls with top social media influencers, two of the people said.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg made the new public speech policies public in an Instagram video. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” the mainstay of Trump’s media diet, saying Meta’s fact-checking partners “had a strong political bias.”

(Fact-checking groups that have worked with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company does with fact-checked content.)

Among its changes, Meta loosened rules to allow people to post hateful statements against people of certain races, religions or sexual orientation, including allowing “allegations of mental illness or abnormality based on a particular gender or sexuality.” The company pointed to political rhetoric about transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule prohibiting users from claiming that people of certain races are responsible for spreading the coronavirus.

Some training materials created by Meta on the new policies were confusing and contradictory, said two employees who reviewed the documents. Some of these posts say that “white people have mental illness” will not be allowed on Facebook, but they say “gay people have mental illness” is allowed.

Meta locked down access to internal policies and training materials Thursday afternoon, they said, hours after The Intercept published the excerpts.

The company also removed transgender and non-binary “themes” from its Messenger chat app, allowing users to customize the app’s colors and wallpaper, two employees said. The change was previously reported by 404 Media.

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 provided to non-gender and transgender employees who use the men’s room and may need sanitary pads, two. said the workers.

Some employees were furious at what they saw as efforts by officials to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before they were announced, two of the people said. While people across the policy spectrum often watch and comment on important updates, most have not had the opportunity this time.

At work, Meta’s Slack internal communication software, employees began arguing about the changes. At the @Pride service group, where workers support LGBTQ+ issues, at least one person has announced their resignation as others have privately communicated that they plan to look for jobs elsewhere, two people said.

In a letter this week to the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, defended Zuckerberg and said topics like transgender issues have become politicized. He said Meta’s policies should not interfere with allowing public debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, a landmark abortion case, as an example of “socially progressive courts” in the 1970s. Schultz said the courts have “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be discussed publicly.

“You get topics that get politicized and stay in the political conversation longer than they would if the public were discussing them,” Schultz wrote. He said the looser restrictions on speech in Meta apps would allow for this kind of debate.

On Friday, Roy Austin, Meta’s vice president of civil rights, announced that he was leaving the company. He did not give a reason.

Zuckerberg went to Palm Beach, Florida, this week, four people with knowledge of his activities said, and on Friday he was said to be at Mar-a-Lago.

In his interview with Rogan, Zuckerberg denied making major changes to appease the incoming Trump administration but said the election influenced his thinking.

“The good thing about doing it after the election is that you can take this tradition,” he said. “We have come to this point where there are these things that you would not say are just normal expressions.”

This article originally appeared The New York Times.