Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg post this week yes Target would reverse its moderation policy to allow more “freedom of expression” was widely seen as the company’s latest attempt to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any other Silicon Valley peer, Meta has taken numerous public steps to reconcile with Trump since his election victory in November.
This followed a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook – similar to other social networks – banning Trump from its platform.
Back in March, Trump was using his preferred nickname “Zuckerschmuck” when referring to Meta’s CEO and declaring that Facebook is “the enemy of the people”.
With Meta now setting herself up as such a key player in artificial intelligenceZuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and implements policies that will allow it to fulfill its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
“Even though Facebook is so powerful, it still had to bow to Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who left the company in 2020.
Meta declined to comment for this article.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta will end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity, and return political content to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg characterized the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content moderation apparatus, which is he said has “reached a point where there are just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The policy shift was the latest strategic shift Meta has made to cozy up to Trump and Republicans since Election Day.
The day before, Meta said that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump, is joining the company’s board.
And last week Meta announced that it is replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who was the company’s vice president of policy. Clegg previously had a career 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 longstanding ties to the Republican Party and once served as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December Kaplan published photos on Facebook of him with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their visit on the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | PA pictures | Getty Images
Many employees of Meta criticized the policy change internally, and some say the company is abdicating its responsibility to create a secure platform. Current and former employees have also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more abuse online because of the new policy, which is due to come into effect in the coming weeks.
Despite employee opposition, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta was more open to such moves after lays off 21,000 employeesor almost a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Those cuts affected much of the Met civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civil integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to resist certain policy decisions, former employees said. Because of the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making sweeping policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.
After the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called Trump’s photo raising a fist with blood running down his face “one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, claiming that the Biden administration pressured Meta’s teams to censor certain content related to Covid-19.
“I believe the pressure from the government was misguided and I’m sorry we weren’t more open about it,” he wrote.
After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other tech executives who visited The president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Target too donated a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund.
On Friday, Meta revealed to his workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that he intends to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in the hiring process, another Trump-friendly move.
The previous day, some details of the company’s new relaxed content moderation guidelines were released published news site The Intercept, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements like “Migrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves. “
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been hauled to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the past 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 updated content policies surprised many of its employees and fact-checking partners, a small group of executives formulated the plans after the US election results. By the New Year, the leadership had begun planning public announcements of a change in its policy, the people said.
Meta typically goes through major “recalibrations” after high-profile US elections, said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of policy and CEO of tech consultancy Anchor Change. When a country changes government, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs based on the political situation, Harbath said.
“In 2028, it will recalibrate,” she said.
After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the US to meet people in countries he had not visited before. He published 6000 words manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.
The social media company faced harsh 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-related content, with policy executive saying 2021 that “the amount of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine that violates our rules is too great by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but they have infuriated Republicans.
The target reacts again momentarily, Harbath said.
“There was no business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-wing,” Harbath said.
While Trump has offered few concrete 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 led to the company not publishing some of its own more advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, too needs more massive data centers and high-end computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There’s a business benefit to Republicans winning, 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 U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., on January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta is not the only one trying to please Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflect a certain level of animus Trump has shown over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship and expressed outrage at the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In July 2024, Trump announced on Truth Social that he intended to “go after election fraud on unprecedented levels, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump repeated that statement in his book “Save America,” writing 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 a year providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 filing. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats to its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. These threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s many security teams.
After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could arm the Justice Department and state intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and how much it would cost the company to defend its CEO against the current president, said the person, who asked not to be named because of 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 CEO, was among a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers they were leaving Facebook.
“Last post before deletion,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before the post could be seen by any of its Threads followers, Meta’s content moderation system removed it, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland said in an interview with CNBC that he couldn’t help but laugh at the situation.
“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
