Mark Zuckerberg has kept the circle of people who know his thinking small.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, 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 J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago during Thanksgiving. Now he needed his staff to turn those changes into policy.
Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his hand-picked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group discussions. Some subordinates have stolen family dinners and holiday gatherings on their way to work, while Mr. Zuckerberg alternates between 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 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 private 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 Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week athlete, blindfolded even by employees on his mission and integrity teams.
On Tuesday, most of Meta’s 72,000 employees learned of Mr. Zuckerberg 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 has a major impact on what people will see online – has been applauded by Mr. for many people who are harassed 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.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, managers and advisers to Mr. Zuckerberg described his change as serving a dual purpose. It puts Meta in a political situation right now, with conservative forces rising in Washington as Mr. Trump taking office on Jan. 20. In addition, the changes reflect the personal views of Mr. Zuckerberg on how his $1.5 trillion company should be run – and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.
Mr. 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 progressive media and Silicon Valley media — including Meta employees — pressuring him to play a larger role in policing discourse. , they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with radio host Joe Rogan on Friday, Mr. 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.”
Recent changes were caused by the victory of Mr. Trump 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’s foundation fund.
In Meta, Mr. 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. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted there was no leak, people with knowledge of the effort said.
The group worked on revising Meta’s “Hate Speech” policy, with Mr. Zuckerberg taking the lead, 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. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were supporters of the changes, the people said.
Mr. Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr. Kaplan as head of Meta’s global public policy to reform and deepen Meta’s relationship with the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister who handled global policy and regulatory affairs. of Meta from 2018. On the eve of Meta’s announcement, Mr. Kaplan held individual calls with top social media influencers, two of the people said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced new public speaking policies in his Instagram video. Mr. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of Mr. Trump’s media diet. Trump, saying that Meta’s fact-checking colleagues had “extremely 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 late Thursday, they said, hours after The Intercept published 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. 404 Media previously reported 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 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. Although people in the policy sector usually watch and comment on important updates, most did not have the opportunity this time.
At work, Meta’s internal communication software Slack, employees began arguing about the changes. At the @Pride employee resource group, a gathering place for LGBTQ workers, at least one person has announced their resignation as others have privately said they plan 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 Mr. Zuckerberg said topics like transgender issues have become political. 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. Mr. Schultz said the courts have “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be discussed publicly.
“You get topics that enter politics and stay in the political discussion for longer than they would have if the public discussed them,” wrote Mr. Schultz. He said the looser restrictions on speech in Meta apps would allow for this kind of debate.
Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., 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 Mr. Rogan, Mr. Zuckerberg has 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 reached this point where there are these things that you wouldn’t say are just normal expressions.”
Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman again Jonathan Swan reporting contributed.
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