Mehta had to “give in to Trump” before taking office | Wilnesh News

Mark Zuckerberg announced this week Yuan Shifting its moderate policies toward allowing more “free expression” is widely seen as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.

Meta has taken more public steps to reconcile with Trump than any of its Silicon Valley peers since he won the election in November.

It follows four years of highly contentious relations between the two men during Trump’s first term, which ended with Facebook (similar to other social media companies) banning Trump from its platform.

As recently as March, Trump use Talking about Meta’s CEO, his favorite nickname is “Zuckerschmuck” declare Facebook is the “enemy of the people.”

With Meta now positioning itself as a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognized that as his company builds data centers and develops policies to achieve its lofty ambitions, people familiar with the company’s plans said Zuckerberg needs support from the White House.

“As powerful as Facebook is, it still had to give in to Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who left Facebook in 2020.

Meta declined to comment for this article.

In a statement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said Meta would end third-party fact-checking, lift restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity, and bring political content back to where users came from. Zuckerberg sees sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content moderation agency. explain “It got to the point where there were too many mistakes and too much scrutiny.”

The policy change is Meta’s latest shift in strategy to work with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.

One day ago, Meta announced that Dana White, Trump’s old friend and UFC CEO, would join the company’s board of directors.

Last week, Meta announced it would replace global affairs president Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s vice president of policy. Craig has previously served in British politics with the Lib Dems, including as deputy prime minister, while Caplan served as deputy chief of staff at the White House 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 served as a law clerk to the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. December, Kaplan release There are photos on Facebook of him visiting the New York Stock Exchange with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump.

Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, with some saying the company was shirking its responsibility to create a secure platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities may face more online abuse as the new policy takes effect in the coming weeks.

Despite backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking say Meta is more willing to take such a move after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

These cuts affect much of Meta’s Civic Integrity, Trust and Safety team. Former employees say the Civic Integrity Group is the closest thing the company has to a white-collar union, with members willing to oppose certain policy decisions. Since the layoffs, Zuckerberg has faced less friction as he makes broad policy changes, people familiar with the matter said.

Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began months before the election.

After the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called Trump’s photo raised fist Blood was streaming down his face. “It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A month later, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee accusing the Biden administration of pressuring the Meta team to censor certain Covid-19 content.

“I think the government pressure is misplaced and I regret that we haven’t been more vocal about this,” he wrote.

After Trump was elected president, Zuckerberg and several other technology executives visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s first fund.

On Friday, Meta revealed to its employees in a memo obtained by CNBC that the company intends to shut down multiple internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in the hiring process, another move that would benefit Trump.

The day before, the company released some details of its new relaxed content moderation guidelines publish Published by news site The Intercept, it shows the offensive rhetoric now allowed under Mehta’s new policy, including lines like “Immigration is better than vomiting” and “I bet Jorge is the guy who stole my backpack after track practice today.” immigration” and other remarks. They are all thieves. “

Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times over the past two administrations to testify before congressional committees, wants to be seen as someone who can work with Trump and Republicans, people familiar with the matter said.

While Meta’s content policy update came as a surprise to many employees and fact-checking partners, a small group of senior executives are making plans in the wake of the U.S. election results. By New Year’s Day, leadership began planning to publicly announce its policy changes, people familiar with the matter said.

Katie Harbath, former policy director at Facebook and CEO of technology consulting firm Anchor Change, said Meta typically undergoes significant “recalibration” after the U.S. election. Habas said that when a country undergoes a change of power, Meta adjusts its policies based on the political situation to best suit its business and reputational needs.

“By 2028, they will be readjusting again,” she said.

For example, after the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, Zuckerberg toured the country, meeting people in states he had never visited before. He published a 6,000-word article The manifesto emphasizes the need for Facebook to build more communities.

After the 2020 election, during the height of the pandemic, Meta took a tougher stance on Covid-19 content, a policy executive explain In 2021, “the amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violated our policies was excessive by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration but have drawn the ire of Republicans.

Habas said Meta reacted to the moment again.

“There’s no business risk in Silicon Valley by becoming more right-leaning,” Habas said.

While Trump has not made any specific policy recommendations for his second administration, Mehta has a lot at stake.

The White House could enact looser AI regulations than the EU. explain Strict restrictions have prevented the company from releasing some of its more advanced artificial intelligence technology. Like other tech giants, Meta needs larger data centers and cutting-edge computer chips to help train and run its advanced artificial intelligence models.

“There will be business benefits from a Republican win because they have traditionally had less regulation,” Habas said.

Mehta is not the only one trying to curry favor with Trump. But the extreme steps the company is taking reflect a certain level of hostility that Trump has expressed over the years.

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

In July 2024, Trump released On the Society of Truth He intends to “go after election fraudsters at an unprecedented level and they will go to prison for long periods of time,” adding “Zach Buck, watch out!” Trump reiterated this statement In his book “Saving America,” Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and said the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.

Meta is spending $14 million annually to provide personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. The company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its chief executive as part of its security measures, people familiar with the matter said. These threats are classified, analyzed and profiled by Meta’s numerous security teams.

In the wake of Trump’s comments, Meta’s security team analyzed how Trump used the Justice Department and national intelligence agencies to target Zuckerberg and the company’s efforts to defend its CEO against a sitting president, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity. At what cost.

Mehta’s efforts to placate the incoming president also pose risks.

On Tuesday, after Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy, many users including former senior executive Bolland told fans through Meta’s Threads service that they would quit Facebook.

“Last post before deletion,” Bolan wrote in the post.

Before his Threads followers could see the post, Meta’s content moderation system removed it, citing online security concerns.

In an interview with CNBC, Bolan said that he couldn’t help laughing when he saw this situation.

“It’s very ironic,” Bolan said.

—CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

watch: Former Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly says Meta is returning to its tradition of free speech