Meta had to ‘bend the knee to Trump’ ahead of inauguration

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta would pivot its moderation policies to allow more “free expression” was widely viewed as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump. 

More than any of its Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.

That follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook — similar to other social media companies — banning Trump from its platform.

As recently as March, Trump was using his preferred nickname of “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about Meta’s CEO and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”

With Meta now positioning itself to be a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and pursues 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 weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.

“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still had to bend the knee 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 bring political content back to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg pitched the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content-moderation apparatus, which he said had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

The policy change was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to buddy up with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.

A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump friend, is joining the company’s board.

And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s policy vice president. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats party, including as a deputy prime minister, while Kaplan was a White House deputy 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 worked as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan posted photos on Facebook of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their visit to the New York Stock Exchange.

Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, with some saying the company is absolving itself of its responsibility to create a safe platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more online abuse due to the new policy, which is set to take effect over the coming weeks. 

Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make these kinds of moves after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023. 

Those cuts affected much of Meta’s civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to push back against certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making broad policy changes, the people said.

Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.

Following the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called the photo of Trump raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A month later, Zuckerberg penned a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta’s teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote. 

After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other technology executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

On Friday, Meta revealed to its workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to shutter several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, representing another Trump-friendly move.

The previous day, some details of the company’s new relaxed content-moderation guidelines were published by the news site The Intercept, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements such as “Migrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves.”

Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the last two administrations, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.

Though Meta’s content-policy updates caught many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives were formulating the plans in the aftermath of the U.S. election results. By New Year’s Day, leadership began planning the public announcements of its policy change, the people said. 

Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after prominent U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director and CEO of tech consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said. 

“In 2028, they’ll recalibrate again,” she said.

After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the U.S. to meet people in states he hadn’t previously visited. He published a 6,000-word manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.

The social media company faced harsh criticism about fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.

Following the 2020 election, during the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a harder stand on Covid-19 content, with a policy executive saying in 2021 that the “amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but it drew the ire of Republicans.

Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.

“There wasn’t a business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-leaning,” Harbath said.

While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has plenty at stake.

The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations compared with those in the European Union, where Meta says harsh restrictions have resulted in the company not releasing some of its more advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, also needs more massive data centers and cutting-edge computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.

“There’s a business benefit to having Republicans win, because they are traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.

Meta isn’t alone in trying to cozy up to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflects a particular level of animus expressed by Trump over the years.

Trump has accused Meta of censorship and has expressed resentment over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In July 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social that he intended to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump reiterated that statement in his book, “Save America,” writing that Zuckerberg plotted 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 annually on providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s multitude of security teams.

After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could weaponize the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.

Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president bring their own risks.

After Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy Tuesday, Boland, the former executive, was among a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers that they were quitting Facebook. 

“Last post before deleting,” Boland wrote in his post.

Before the post could be seen by any of his Threads followers, Meta’s content moderation system had taken it down, citing cybersecurity reasons. 

Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation. 

“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.

— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

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