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.According to The New York Times, after meeting with President-elect Donald J. Trump in November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to relax the company’s speech policies. He formed a small team to implement these changes within a few weeks, and the consequences are just beginning to unfold.
Zuckerberg kept his circle of confidants small, tapping only a handful of top policy and communications executives to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had made the decision to make significant changes after his visit to Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving, and now he needed his team to turn his ideas into concrete policies.
Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his handpicked team held numerous Zoom meetings, conference calls, and late-night group chats to discuss how to implement the changes. Some employees even worked during their holiday gatherings and family dinners, while Zuckerberg himself weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Kauai.
By New Year’s Day, Zuckerberg was ready to announce the changes to the public, according to sources familiar with the events. This process was highly unusual for Meta, as the company typically takes months to make policy changes and seeks input from employees, civic leaders, and other stakeholders. However, Zuckerberg turned this effort into a six-week sprint, catching even his own policy and integrity teams off guard.
On Tuesday, Meta’s 72,000 employees learned about the changes along with the rest of the world. The company announced that it was loosening restrictions on contentious social issues such as immigration, gender, and sexuality, ending its fact-checking program, and relying on users to police misinformation. It also stated that it would increase the amount of political content in users’ feeds, a significant shift from its previous approach.
Since then, the changes have received mixed reactions, with praise from Trump and conservatives, criticism from President Biden, and concerns from fact-checking groups and LGBTQ advocacy organizations. Many fear that these changes will lead to more online and offline harassment.
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