Inside Mark Zuckerberg's sprint to remake Meta for the Trump era

San Francisco: Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.

Last month, Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, tapped 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 Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees 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 chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to work while Zuckerberg weighed in 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 entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters policies that govern its apps -- which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads -- by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any shifts generally take months. But Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.

On Tuesday, most of Meta's 72,000 employees learned of Zuckerberg's plans along with the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant said it was overhauling speech on its apps by loosening restrictions on how people can talk about contentious social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking program that had been aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to police falsehoods. And it said it would insert more political content into people's feeds after previously de-emphasizing that very material.

In the days since, the moves -- which have broad implications for what people will see online -- have drawn applause from Trump and conservatives, derision from fact-checking groups and misinformation researchers and concerns from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups that fear the changes will lead to more people getting harassed online and offline.

Inside Meta, the reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees have celebrated the moves, while others were shocked and have openly castigated the changes on the company's internal message boards. Several employees wrote that they were ashamed to work for Meta.

On Friday, Meta's makeover continued when the company told employees it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated its chief diversity officer role, ended its 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 businesses when hiring vendors.

Meta planned to "focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background," Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post that was relayed to The New York Times.

In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisers to Zuckerberg described his shift as serving a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the political landscape of the moment, with conservative power ascendant in Washington as Trump takes office Jan. 20. More than that, the changes reflect Zuckerberg's personal views of how his $1.5 trillion company should be run -- and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.

Zuckerberg, 40, has regularly spoken to friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are policing speech, the people said. He has also felt railroaded by what he views as the Biden administration's anti-tech posturing, 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 heavy hand in policing discourse, they said.

Meta declined to comment.

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg said it was time to go "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 content, adding, "I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and this is how it's going to be going forward."

The latest changes were catalyzed 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-elect's inaugural fund.

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

The group worked on revising Meta's "Hate Speech" policy, with Zuckerberg leading the charge, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which lays out what to do with slurs, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to "Hateful Conduct."

That effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from speech, minimizing Meta's role in policing online conversation. Kaplan and Martin were cheerleaders of the changes, these people said.

Zuckerberg decided to promote Kaplan to Meta's head of global public policy to carry out the changes and deepen Meta's ties to the incoming 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, Kaplan held individual calls with top conservative social media influencers, two people said.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg made the new speech policies public in his Instagram video. Kaplan appeared on "Fox & Friends," a mainstay of Trump's media diet, saying 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 that was fact-checked.)

Among its changes, Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including permitting "allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation." The company cited political discourse about transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that forbade users from saying people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.

Some training materials that Meta created for the new policies were confusing and contradictory, two employees who reviewed the documents said. Some of the text said that saying "white people have mental illness" would be prohibited on Facebook, but saying "gay people have mental illness" was allowed, they said.

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

The company also removed the transgender and nonbinary "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.

That same day at Meta's offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men's bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men's room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.

Some employees were livid at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the "Hateful Conduct" policy before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy division typically view and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.

On Workplace, Meta's Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing over the changes. In the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support LGBTQ+ issues convene, at least one person announced their resignation as others privately relayed to one another that they planned to look for jobs elsewhere, two people said.

In a post this week to the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta's chief marketing officer, defended Zuckerberg and said that topics like transgender issues had become politicized. He said Meta's policies should not get in the way of allowing societal debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of "courts getting ahead of society" in the 1970s. Schultz said the courts "politicized" the issue instead of allowing it to be debated civically.

"You find topics become politicized and stay in the political conversation for far longer than they would've if society just debated them out," Schultz wrote. He said that looser restrictions on speech in Meta's apps would allow for this kind of debate.

In his interview with Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg denied making sweeping changes to appease the incoming Trump administration but said that the election did influence his thinking.

"The good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this cultural pulse," he said. "We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn't say that were just mainstream discourse."