Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Vision: Transforming Meta in the Trump Era

Mark Zuckerberg kept his plans limited to a select group of trusted individuals.

Last month, Meta’s CEO convened a small group of top policy and communications executives, along with other key figures, to discuss the company’s strategy for handling online speech. Following his meeting with President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving, Zuckerberg decided to implement significant changes and relied on this team to translate his vision into actionable policies.

Over the following weeks, Zuckerberg and his chosen team worked tirelessly through Zoom calls, conference meetings, and late-night chats. Some team members even interrupted family dinners and holiday plans to focus on the task, while Zuckerberg provided input between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Kauai.

By New Year’s Day, Zuckerberg was prepared to unveil the changes publicly, as confirmed by four current and former Meta employees and advisers familiar with the events, though they were not authorized to speak on the record.

This process marked a sharp departure from Meta’s usual approach. Typically, policy changes across Meta’s platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads — involve extensive input from employees, civic leaders, and other stakeholders, with decisions often taking months. However, Zuckerberg turned this effort into an intense six-week initiative, catching even his own policy and integrity teams off guard.

On Tuesday, the majority of Meta’s 72,000 employees discovered Mark Zuckerberg’s plans at the same time as the public. The tech giant announced a major overhaul of its approach to online speech, loosening restrictions on how users discuss sensitive topics like immigration, gender, and sexuality. Meta also ended its fact-checking program, shifting the responsibility for addressing misinformation onto users. Additionally, the company decided to reintroduce more political content into people’s feeds, reversing its previous efforts to minimize such material.

The changes, which significantly impact what users will encounter online, have sparked mixed reactions. Former President Donald Trump and conservatives praised the move, while President Joe Biden and his administration criticized it. Fact-checking organizations and misinformation researchers expressed disappointment, and L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups raised concerns that the new policies could increase harassment both online and offline.

Inside Meta, the response to these sweeping changes has been deeply polarized. While some employees welcomed the new direction, others were taken aback and openly criticized the decisions on the company’s internal message boards. Several expressed feelings of disappointment, with some stating they were ashamed to be part of the organization.

The shake-up continued on Friday, as Meta announced the dismantling of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The company abolished the role of chief diversity officer, ended its diversity hiring goals that aimed to increase the representation of women and minorities, and decided to no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring vendors. These moves marked a significant shift in Meta’s approach to fostering inclusivity within the company.

Meta announced plans to prioritize “fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” Janelle Gale, Vice President of Human Resources, shared in an internal post, which was later obtained by The New York Times.

Meanwhile, at the White House on Friday, President Biden publicly criticized Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to abandon fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, calling it “shameful.”

According to more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives, and advisers close to Zuckerberg, the shift serves a dual purpose. It aligns Meta with the current political climate, where conservative influence is growing as Donald Trump prepares to take office on January 20. Simultaneously, it reflects Zuckerberg’s evolving personal vision for how his $1.5 trillion company should operate, a vision he is now unapologetically making public.

Zuckerberg, 40, has reportedly shared his concerns with friends and colleagues, including venture capitalist and Meta board member Marc Andreessen, about the influence of progressives in regulating speech. He has also expressed frustration with what he perceives as the Biden administration’s anti-tech stance and the pressure from progressive voices in the media, Silicon Valley, and even Meta’s own workforce to take a more restrictive approach to content moderation.

During an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg emphasized a return to Meta’s “original mission” of empowering people to share ideas freely. He stated that he had felt pressured by both the Biden administration and the media to censor certain types of content but now has a clearer sense of what Meta’s policy should be, declaring, “This is how it’s going to be going forward.”

Meta declined to comment on the developments.

The catalyst for Meta’s recent policy changes was Donald Trump’s victory in the November election. Shortly after, Mark Zuckerberg flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect. In the weeks that followed, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Within Meta, Zuckerberg began laying the groundwork for altering the company’s speech policies. Aware of the controversy such changes would stir, he assembled a small, trusted team of no more than a dozen advisers and executives. This group included Joel Kaplan, a seasoned policy executive with strong Republican connections; Kevin Martin, Meta’s head of U.S. policy; and David Ginsberg, the head of communications. Zuckerberg emphasized confidentiality, insisting there be no leaks, according to individuals familiar with the initiative.

The team focused on revising Meta’s “Hate Speech” policy, with Zuckerberg spearheading the effort. They ultimately renamed it “Hateful Conduct,” signaling a shift in how Meta addresses slurs, threats, and harmful content targeting protected groups across its platforms.

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This adjustment effectively shifted the focus of Meta’s rules away from monitoring speech, reducing the company’s role in regulating online conversations. According to those familiar with the matter, Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin actively supported and championed these changes.

Mr. Zuckerberg chose to promote Joel Kaplan to the role of Meta’s head of global public policy, tasking him with implementing the changes and strengthening Meta’s relationship with the incoming Trump administration. Kaplan replaced Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister who had overseen global policy and regulatory matters for Meta since 2018. The night before the official announcement, Kaplan personally reached out to prominent conservative social media influencers through individual calls, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg revealed the new speech policies in an Instagram video. Meanwhile, Mr. Kaplan appeared on Fox & Friends, a show closely followed by Mr. Trump’s supporters, where he stated that Meta’s fact-checking partners had “too much political bias.”

In its policy changes, Meta relaxed rules on speech, allowing statements that expressed hatred toward specific races, religions, or sexual orientations. This included permitting “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,” which the company said was related to political discussions around transgender rights. Additionally, Meta lifted a restriction that previously prohibited users from claiming certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.

Some of Meta’s internal training materials on the new policies were found to be confusing and contradictory. For instance, one document suggested that claiming “white people have mental illness” would be banned, while “gay people have mental illness” would be allowed. In response to the backlash, Meta locked access to the policies and training materials hours after The Intercept published excerpts.

Further, the company removed transgender and nonbinary customization options from its Messenger app and ordered facilities managers to take tampons out of men’s bathrooms—measures intended for nonbinary and transgender employees. These changes sparked further employee outrage, particularly among those in the Pride@ employee resource group, where some workers resigned and others began to seek new job opportunities.

In a post defending Mr. Zuckerberg, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, argued that topics like transgender rights had been politicized and that the company’s policies should allow for open societal debate. He cited the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade as an example of the courts politicizing an issue that could have been more freely debated.

On Friday, Meta’s vice president of civil rights, Roy Austin, announced he was leaving the company, though he did not provide a reason. Mr. Zuckerberg, who was in Palm Beach and reportedly at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, addressed the changes in his interview with Joe Rogan, stating that the election had influenced his thinking, though he denied the changes were made to appease the incoming Trump administration. He explained that after the election, he felt it was important to take a “cultural pulse,” acknowledging that some topics had become off-limits in mainstream discourse.