Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era

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Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Supported by SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era After visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump in November, Mr. Zuckerberg decided to relax Meta’s speech policies. He asked a small team to carry out his goals within weeks. The repercussions are just beginning. Listen to this article · 10:25 min Learn more Share full article 513 Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has regularly spoken to friends and colleagues about his concerns that progressives were policing speech. Credit… Jim Wilson/The New York Times By Mike Isaac Sheera Frenkel and Kate Conger Reporting from San Francisco Jan. 10, 2025 Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small. Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive 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 J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy. Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his handpicked 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 Mr. Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the island of Kauai. By 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 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 sweeping implications for what people will see online — have drawn applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives, criticism from President Biden, derision from fact-checking groups and misinformation researchers, and concerns from L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups that fear the changes will lead to more people getting harassed online and offline. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in . Want all of The Times? Subscribe . Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT