Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement this week. Meta It will pivot its moderation policies to allow more “free expression” in what was widely seen as the company’s latest attempt to please President-elect Donald Trump.

More than any of his Silicon Valley colleagues, Metta has taken a number of public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.

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

As recently as March, Trump was. By using When Meta’s CEO and Announcement That Facebook was “the enemy of the people.”

With Meta now positioning itself as a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg acknowledged the White House’s need for help as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that allow it to maintain its high profile. ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still has to bow to Trump,” said former Facebook vice president Brian Boland, who will leave the company in 2020.

Meta declined to comment for this article.

In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta would eliminate third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity, and bring political content back into users’ feeds. Zuckerberg made major policy changes as key to strengthening Meta’s content moderation apparatus, which he called said “It got to a point where there’s a lot of mistakes and a lot of censorship.”

The policy shift was the latest strategic shift Metta has made since Election Day in his friendship with Trump and Republicans.

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

And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing its global affairs president, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s vice president of policy. Clegg had earlier started a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats, including as Deputy Prime Minister, while Kaplan was 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 conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. . In December, Kaplan Posted Photos of himself on Facebook with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump during a visit to the New York Stock Exchange.

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

Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking say Meta is more than ready to make such moves after laying off 21,000 employees, or about a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

These cuts affected Meta’s civil integrity and trust and safety teams. Civil Integrity Group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, whose members wanted 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 allusion to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.

Zuckerberg called out Trump’s image after the first assassination attempt on Trump in July. Raising his fist His face was bleeding “one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

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

“I believe the government pressure was misplaced, and I regret that we were not more clear 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. Metta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

On Friday, Metta disclosed to his workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that he plans to close several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, another Trump-friendly one. Represents action.

The other day, there were some details of the company’s new relaxed content-moderation guidelines. published According to news site The Intercept, Metta’s new policy will now allow such offensive rhetoric, including statements such as “immigrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet George is the one Whoever stole my bag after track practice today, immigrants are all thieves.”

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

While Meta’s content policy updates surprised many of its employees and fact-checking partners, a small group of executives were making plans after the U.S. election results. By New Year’s Day, the leadership began planning public announcements of its policy changes, the people said.

Katie Harbeth, Facebook’s former policy director and CEO of tech consulting firm AnchorChange, said the meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after high-profile U.S. elections. When power changes in the country, Metta adapts his policies based on the political landscape to suit his business and reputational needs, Harbeth said.

“In 2028, they will reset again,” he said.

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

After the 2020 election, during the pandemic, Metta, along with a policy executive, took a hard line on the content of CoVID-19. is saying in 2021 that “the amount of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine that violates our policies is too high by our standards.” Those efforts may have satisfied the Biden administration, but they angered Republicans.

“Once again, Metta is reacting to the moment,” Harbeth said.

“There was no business risk here in Silicon Valley to lean too far to the right,” Harbeth said.

While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Metta has raised the stakes.

The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations than the EU, where meta They say The company is not releasing some of its latest AI technologies as a result of strict restrictions. Meta, like other tech giants, needs more massive data centers and advanced computer chips to help train and run its latest AI models.

“There’s a business advantage to Republicans winning, because they’re traditionally less regulatory,” Harbeth said.

Metta is not alone in trying to make Trump comfortable. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflect a certain level of exasperation that Trump has expressed over the years.

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

In July 2024, Trump posted. Truth on social That he “plans to go after election fraud to a level never seen before, and send them to prison for long periods of time,” Zuckerbergs, beware! Trump Repeated this statement In his book “Save America,” he writes that Zuckerberg conspired against him during the 2020 election and that if it happened again, the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison.”

According to the company’s 2024 proxy statement, Metta spends $14 million annually on personal security for Zuckerberg and his family. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. These 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 arm the Justice Department and domestic intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what the company would pay for defending its CEO against the current president. It will, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Privacy

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

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

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

Before followers of any of its threads could see the post, Meta’s content moderation system removed it, citing cybersecurity reasons.

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

“It’s very ironic,” Boland said.

— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

Look: Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former chief privacy officer, says Meta is returning to the tradition of free speech.