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With bird flu cases on the rise, staff at California lab say they are overworked and burned out
On a recent Friday morning, Alyssa Laxamana arrived at a laboratory on the UC Davis campus to continue California’s race against bird flu.
A note from her supervisor had alerted Laxamana that about 130 samples of cow milk and other dairy products were en route — a large but manageable workload. She got to work preparing the buffer solutions and other supplies she would need to test the samples for H5N1 influenza, the virus that causes the flu spreading through California’s cattle and poultry farms.
Laxamana’s plans, however, quickly went out the window. More samples kept popping up in a digital queue as another lab worker logged unexpected shipments. Around noon she had to draw a line. She calculated she could get through about 270 samples that day. The rest would have to wait.
“I can only do so much,” Laxamana recalled saying to herself.
Laxamana works in the biotechnology department of the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory, the first line of defense in the state’s effort to track and prevent the spread of the H5N1 virus.
Far from working at full capacity, however, the Davis lab has been roiled over the past year by workplace tensions. Understaffing and poor management, Laxamana and other current and former employees say, have left lab employees overworked and struggling to keep pace with testing demands, while creating an environment where mistakes are more likely. An exodus of most of the staff this year left Laxamana and a co-worker for a period as the only two people testing for the virus on a daily basis.
The stakes for the lab are high: It is the only lab in the state with the authority to confirm bird flu cases. Although there is no evidence that the alleged workplace problems have contributed to an outbreak, processing tests quickly gives farmers a jump on quarantining or culling infected animals.
“Any potential delay in testing could result in greater spread,” said Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee, who specializes in influenza in birds and other animals.
The problems come amid a rising tide of bird flu cases at poultry and dairy farms and an increasing threat to humans. Last week the Davis lab confirmed the virus had been found in a retail sample of raw milk from a Fresno-based dairy, which health officials warn may have been sold in stores in Los Angeles County. And, so far, about 30 people in the state — the vast majority of them dairy workers — are known to have been infected.
Bill Kisliuk, a spokesperson for UC Davis, denied that workplace issues have left the lab ill-equipped to handle bird flu testing. He said the facility has “maintained the supervision, staffing and resources necessary to provide timely and vital health and safety information to those asking us to perform tests throughout the current outbreak of avian flu.”
After The Times inquired about staffing levels and other workplace issues, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services inspected the lab in October, while UC Davis officials hired more staff and got help from a lab in Wisconsin, according to current staff. UC Davis officials declined to confirm the moves.
The spokesperson for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which jointly operates the lab, deferred questions to UC Davis, saying, “CAHFS lab has done tremendous work under demanding circumstances.”
The virus is taking a rising toll on the state’s dairy and poultry industries. Since September, outbreaks at turkey farms, chicken broilers, egg-laying facilities and other producers around the state have affected more than 6 million birds, according to USDA data. And while the virus is less lethal in cows than birds, dead cows and calves have piled up along roadsides in Tulare County, with farmers and veterinarians reporting mortality rates far higher than expected. Also worrisome for a state that produces 20% of the country’s milk is the steep drop-off in milk production farmers have reported among cows that recover from the flu.
Discontent over staffing, pay and other alleged workplace issues has pervaded the lab over the past two years, emails and other communications reviewed by The Times show.
In May 2023, employees in the biotechnology section sent a petition to the lab’s managers demanding they address the staff’s concerns. After getting no reply, they sent another note viewed by The Times in November, accusing managers of refusing “time and again” to make improvements. Their workload, they added, had “measurably increased” since the temporary closure of the another CAHFS lab in Tulare earlier that year due to flooding.
California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory worker Alyssa Laxamana, left, and former worker Kayla Dollar at the UC Davis lab in September.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“We operate with the mindset that the next outbreak is always around the corner, and we need proper training opportunities and competitive salary to remain adequately staffed for that eventuality,” they wrote.
Several lab staff quit their jobs in the first half of 2024, leaving behind what they described as a relatively inexperienced, skeletal crew.
Helen Kado-Fong, a supervisor who had worked in the biotechnology department for about 12 years decided to retire early in May. She said she had become fed up with what she described as an attitude of indifference or hostility toward efforts by her and others in the lab to raise concerns.
In an email she sent a few months before she left to the dean of UC Davis veterinary school and CAHFS director, Kado-Fong warned the “high turnover and disengagement of technical staff is weakening the ability of the CAHFS laboratory to fulfill its mission.”
Another to quit was Kayla Dollar, a lab assistant in the department for about two years, who said she left in June after being rejected for a promotion to a lab technician. Dollar said she was told she didn’t get the job because she didn’t have sufficient experience. Dollar said she was perplexed by the explanation because her supervisor Kado-Fong had been trying to get the OK to have Dollar receive training to prepare her for the technician role.
“I was hitting a wall at every turn,” Dollar said.
Dollar was hired at a UC Davis veterinary genetics lab in June as a biotechnologist, the same position she had been rejected from at CAHFS.
And Jasmine Burke quit her post as one of the lab’s technicians in July, she said, after being threatened with discipline for raising concerns about long work hours and rushed testing procedures. She and others said that as the lab rushed to meet 24-hour turnaround times for bird flu testing, other types of tests became backlogged, and she and other staff failed at times to keep up with routine lab maintenance, such as recalibrating machines and ensuring refrigerators holding samples and chemical solutions were set at the correct temperature.
“Every attempt to communicate concerns here goes nowhere,” she wrote to the university’s human resources department, according to an email viewed by The Times. Burke now works as a barista at a coffee shop.
Kisliuk, the UC Davis spokesperson, declined to respond to questions about specific incidents involving employees. “When a staff member reports concerns about workplace safety or conditions, we review the matter and take the appropriate steps,” he wrote in an emailed statement.
By July, five employees had departed, leaving behind only Laxamana and colleague Victoria Ontiveros, who have worked in the lab for two years or less.
Late one afternoon on a day in September, Ontiveros recalled how she changed into scrubs and donned two sets of surgical gloves, goggles, an N95 mask, a lab coat and a hairnet — the required gear for entering the Biosafety Level 3 lab, or BSL-3, where samples suspected of containing the virus are tested. Only approved staff can enter the facility through a locked door that requires an iris scan to open.
California officials have blocked Raw Milk dairy in Fresno from distributing its raw dairy products.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
Ontiveros had already done several long shifts in the BSL-3 that week, which with normal staffing would have been divided among multiple people, she said. Now, she was preparing to test cow milk samples that had arrived at the lab around 2 p.m. Typically, samples received after noon were tested the following day, but she said her supervisors had insisted these needed to be turned around quickly as infections spread.
She said she worked for hours, painstakingly pipetting drops of the samples into tiny glass wells as part of the testing process, which extracts genetic material in order to detect the presence of the virus. Then, late in the evening, she realized she had programmed one of the machines analyzing the samples incorrectly. Ontiveros felt a sharp pang of despair. All her work, and the hours Laxamana had spent earlier in the day mixing a chemical solution to wash the samples, had been wasted.
It was around 9 p.m. when she emerged from the lab. She had started her workday around 8 a.m. The tests would have to be redone the next day.
“We are stretched so thin that mistakes can happen,” Ontiveros said. “I was so tired and mentally drained.”
At the time, Ontiveros said she was handling the testing of cow milk largely on her own, although another worker was sometimes sent up from the Tulare lab to help on weekends. While Laxamana had the required security clearance, she hadn’t yet completed the necessary training.
“There’s this huge pressure on me and and responsibility to show up to work every day because I have no backup,” Ontiveros said.
Later in September, Laxamana described being put straight to work as the number of cattle milk samples was ramping up. She said she was asked to run 44 samples without ever having completed a practice run. The only hands-on training she had had was twice shadowing the testing process. As Laxamana worked, Ontiveros stood nearby, supervising.
Already nervous, Laxamana said she was distracted by a walkie-talkie that crackled with voices as she tried to work. Colleagues in the main lab were peppering her with questions about what to do about another batch of tests that appeared to have failed. Holding a pipette carefully in one hand, Laxamana talked through the radio to troubleshoot the problem.
At times this year understaffing has led to quality control missteps, current and former workers said.
Laxamana described coming to work one morning in October and realizing results of tests she had run the day before had not been analyzed properly by lab staff. She said a manager assured Laxamana the errors would be corrected, but when she checked later that day the results had not been changed.
She said she stopped a case coordinator from releasing the incorrect results to farmers, which would have resulted in the culling of birds.
Earlier this year, a poultry sample got misplaced and went untested for three weeks, Laxamana said. She attributed the mistake to being overworked, saying, “There were only two people handling the workload, and things were missed in all of that chaos.”
Kisliuk, the UC Davis spokesperson, declined to answer questions about specific incidents described where workers made mistakes or where managers made mistakes. “We have multiple levels of quality assurance and extensive training of staff,” he said.
In late summer the lab hired a supervisor and others to join the lab. The move created additional work for Laxamana and Ontiveros, who said they were required to juggle their own work while also helping with training the new arrivals.
In recent weeks the supervisor and another new hire took over testing of high-risk poultry samples, but Laxamana and Ontiveros said staffing shortages remain.
Still, Laxamana doesn’t think about leaving.
“There are things that I can do to help prevent a disaster,” she said.“I could not bear to leave the lab in the condition that it is right now.”
Following the political winds
Meta’s bombshell announcement on Tuesday that it would end its fact-checking program was widely read as a major shift in policy meant to please President-elect Donald Trump and other conservatives.
In reality, the move was probably less radical than it initially seemed. But the turn still serves as a reminder that many corporate leaders see their highest priority as reading the room — one that Trump now dominates.
Mark Zuckerberg has been moving in this direction for some time. In relation to the 2016 election, the Meta chief, who has a history of tacking where political winds blow, followed other tech companies in partnering with fact-checking groups to police content on its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Since then, however, the tech mogul has fumed as Meta was criticized for both failing to do enough — and for removing too many user posts.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes, including a move to X-style user-policing known as Community Notes. (Katie Harbath, a former communications executive at Meta, told The Times, “This is an evolved return to his political origins.”)
The changes aren’t necessarily as big as they first appeared. Politico noted that Meta had been paring back its moderation efforts in recent years. And while Zuckerberg promoted plans to move such workers to Texas to “eliminate bias,” many such workers are already based there.
Zuckerberg isn’t alone: Tech companies haven’t ever wanted to be in the business of moderating user content. Last summer, YouTube began testing a version of Community Notes, though it was described as more of a supplemental feature.
Is the political payoff for Meta worth the criticism? Trump, who had railed against the company’s moves to police his content — including briefly shutting down his Facebook account after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol — said the tech giant had “come a long way.” (He also said his threats against Zuckerberg “probably” contributed to the new policy.)
Meta executives may hope that, along with the elevation of the longtime Republican executive Joel Kaplan to lead global affairs, a $1 million donation to the Trump inaugural fund and the addition of the Trump ally Dana White to its board, may get them into the president-elect’s good graces.
A factor worth watching: Zuckerberg said he would work with Trump to “push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” That was a thinly veiled shot against the European Union, which has sought to punish companies, including Meta, for insufficiently policing their platforms — and may increase its scrutiny of the tech giant after Tuesday’s move.
Will the move work? So far, advertisers aren’t publicly objecting. And Tuesday’s news most likely allays concerns that Trump regulatory picks, including Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, had about Meta.
But Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, wrote on X that Meta’s change was simply “a ploy to avoid being regulated.” She added, “We will not be fooled.”
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Wildfires near Los Angeles force widespread evacuations. Parts of Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades were hit by a blaze that destroyed homes and forced at least 30,000 to flee for safety. Another fire, near Pasadena, was also causing issues as officials warned of devastating losses.
Anthropic is close to raising billions more in capital. The artificial intelligence start-up is in advanced talks to collect $2 billion in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, The Times reports. If completed, the fund-raising would value Anthropic at $60 billion — roughly three times as much as it was worth a year ago — in another sign that the deal making frenzy around A.I. shows no signs of slowing.
JPMorgan Chase reportedly plans to call employees back to the office five days a week. That’s up from the requirement of three days a week, according to Bloomberg, though about 60 percent of Wall Street giant’s staff is already at the office full time. Other major companies have already reduced or eliminated work-from-home policies instituted during the coronavirus pandemic; JPMorgan’s C.E.O., Jamie Dimon, has long criticized hybrid working arrangements.
The markets are taking Trump seriously
Coming into 2025, the big questions hanging over President-elect Donald Trump’s second term included tax cuts, the Fed’s independence and potential new trade war.
But few could have foreseen the president-elect refusing to rule out military force or economic coercion against allies as he did on Tuesday at a wide-ranging news conference at Mar-a-Lago. It underscores that for markets, a Trump presidency brings plenty of potential black swan events.
A recap: Trump revealed an expansive vision of “America First,” doubling down on calls for the United States to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. And he spoke of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” though it was unclear how serious he was about that.
The Trump effect can be seen in the markets on Wednesday. The S&P 500 looks set to open lower, and sectors like green energy and companies including Tesla slumped after Trump railed on Tuesday about wind turbines and grumbled about electric vehicles.
And the yield on the 10-year Treasury note hit a roughly nine-month high on Tuesday, a worrying sign for house hunters and credit-card holders.
Some market watchers still believe that markets could check the Trump agenda. Bond vigilantes could act as a brake on Trump’s policies if they reignite inflation.
And more broadly, the Trump team cares “about the verdict of financial markets,” Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg, wrote in a research note on Wednesday. “If their actions were to impair the potential for growth and corporate earnings badly enough to trigger a sell-off, they might change tack.”
There are signs that might prove true. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday that it would be “hard” to bring down consumer prices, a major shift from what he told supporters on the campaign trail. His big inflation-fighting idea, expanding oil drilling, hasn’t yet affected the markets, with crude oil prices on a steady rise in recent weeks. (President Biden’s ban on new oil exploration in vast stretches of U.S. waters has contributed to that price surge, and may be hard for Trump to undo.)
That said, the VIX volatility index, known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, has been stable for weeks, a sign that equity investors are still bullish.
Trump’s record-breaking inauguration
Donald Trump’s transition team has already amassed a mega budget to throw an inauguration bash for the ages.
And the president-elect can thank the giants of the tech industry and Wall Street — some of the same figures who’ve met with him recently at Mar-a-Lago — for the record haul of at least $150 million. Few federal rules govern how Trump and his associates can spend the money.
Donors who have gone public include: Amazon, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Meta and Uber. Executives such as Tim Cook of Apple, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber and Sam Altman of OpenAI have also chipped in.
Contributing to inauguration funds has become a corporate America tradition. “You’re giving money directly to the incoming president with no risk of backing the wrong horse,” Craig Holman, a lobbyist with Public Citizen, a consumer rights watchdog, told DealBook’s Sarah Kessler. Donors who give $1 million to the fund receive tickets to the inauguration plus other events such as a reception with cabinet picks and a pre-inauguration dinner with Trump.
There are only a few restrictions. Foreign nationals are not allowed to donate, and donations over $200 must be disclosed. And anti-bribery laws apply. “Beyond that, it’s pretty much open in terms of who may contribute and how they may spend it,” said Kenneth Gross, a lawyer specializing in campaign finance at Akin Gump.
The inauguration fund pays for the parties, dinners and the parade, while taxpayers foot the bill for security and the swearing-in ceremony.
What will happen to unspent funds? Two people involved in the fund-raising for Trump’s inauguration told The Times that donors expected the remaining money to go to Trump’s presidential library.
The last time, Trump’s team raised $107 million (the previous record). It was later revealed that a nearly $26 million payment went to an event planning firm created by an adviser to the first lady, Melania Trump.
Lawmakers have sought to change things. One bill introduced in 2023 would limit contributions to $50,000. But such efforts have gained little traction.
The big new corporate bet: Bitcoin
Corporate treasury departments are usually bastions of caution, preferring to invest their companies’ money in stable assets like Treasury bonds. But a growing number are choosing to go a different route by investing in crypto.
By one estimate, more than 70 publicly traded companies have invested in Bitcoin, despite some having nothing to do with crypto. At least a few have been inspired by MicroStrategy, a software company that began amassing Bitcoin in 2020 — and now sits on a stockpile worth over $40 billion. MicroStrategy’s stock price is up roughly tenfold over the past 18 months.
But it means that those companies are putting their money in a highly volatile asset that could imperil their finances if things go wrong, The Times’s David Yaffe-Bellany and Joe Rennison write:
The investments are a sharp pivot away from the cautious approach of the traditional corporate treasury department, whose focus is typically safeguarding cash rather than risking it for a higher return. Typical reserve assets include steady, predictable securities like U.S. government bonds and money market funds.
“I cannot understand how a risk-averse board could justify an investment in digital assets, given we know they swing quite significantly,” said Naresh Agarwal, an associate director at the Association of Corporate Treasurers, a trade organization. “It is quite an opaque market.”
Some investors aren’t on board with this new tactic. When Banzai, a publicly traded marketing firm, decided to invest in Bitcoin, some shareholders expressed alarm. Joe Davy, its C.E.O., told The Times: “I got a couple of phone calls from people who were like: ‘What the hell is going on over there? What are you thinking?’”
THE SPEED READ
Deals
Politics and policy
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The Justice Department added six major landlords, including Blackstone’s LivCor, to a price-fixing lawsuit against the real estate software company RealPage. (WSJ)
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Theodore Farnsworth, the former C.E.O. of MoviePass’s parent company, pleaded guilty to fraud over misleading investors about the business’ “unlimited” subscription plan. (NYT)
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For more than 50 years, as the economics of American healthcare and health insurance have evolved, one theory has persisted, unchanged: To promote better and more efficient medical treatment, patients must have “skin in the game.”
The idea is that requiring fees for doctor or hospital visits — through co-pays, deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing — will prompt people to think twice before seeking treatment for anything but a truly serious condition.
“On the question of whether patients should have to pay part of the cost of their covered medical care, our profession’s advice has been unequivocal,” health economists Liran Einav of Stanford and Amy Finkelstein of MIT wrote in their 2023 book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” “Patients must pay something for their care, otherwise they’ll rush to the doctor every time they sneeze.”
Among all advanced industrial countries, the U.S. goes furthest in using premiums, copays, and deductibles to influence access to care.
— Merrill Goozner, STAT
Einav and Finkelstein own up to having “preached the gospel” of skin-in-the-game “to generations of students.”
Now here’s their punchline: “We take it back.”
To healthcare reformers such as single-payer advocates Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, the confessional by Einav and Finkelstein “may signal an encouraging shift in elite opinion, at least among economists,” as they wrote recently in the New York Review of Books.
Others have begun to take notice. “Among all advanced industrial countries, the U.S. goes furthest in using premiums, copays, and deductibles to influence access to care,” the veteran healthcare journalist Merrill Goozner observes. “It is time to put an end to this failed experiment.”
Yet the imposition of financial obstacles to limit access to care still exerts a powerful influence on healthcare policy in the U.S. In part, this is because it makes sense, superficially. The mantra goes: “If you want less of something, tax it more.” So it has a built-in appeal to government budget hawks and corporate executives who want to reduce healthcare spending.
For some, there’s a moral component — why shouldn’t people take personal responsibility for their own health, whether by smoking and eating less or paying for healthcare partially out of their own pockets, even if they have to be forced to make treatment choices based partially on their out-of-pocket costs?
Then there’s the empirical evidence: It’s true that the higher the co-pays and deductibles, the less medical care people seek, on average.
The seminal study on this topic was Rand’s Health Insurance Experiment, reported in 1981. Starting in 1971, Rand recruited 2,750 families — 7,700 individuals — slotted randomly into five groups: One was offered free care, three groups were offered different levels of cost-sharing, and the fifth was placed in a nonprofit HMO.
Rand found that the groups with cost-sharing made one or two fewer physician visits a year and had 20% fewer hospitalizations than the group with free care. Their dental visits, prescriptions and mental health treatments were also lower. Unsurprisingly, they spent less on healthcare.
The initial findings seemed to validate the skin-in-the-game theory. As Rand continued reporting out the results over the next few years, however, air began to leak out of the balloon.
It became clear that although the cost-sharing subjects cut back on ineffective or unnecessary care, they also cut back on effective and necessary treatments. The reduced utilizations, Rand found, occurred because the subjects decided to delay or forgo treatments, possibly inadvisedly. Once they initiated care, the effect of cost-sharing dropped away, as the patients ceded their decision-making to their healthcare providers.
Some decisions weren’t affected at all by cost-sharing. “The proportion of inappropriate hospitalizations was the same (23 percent) for cost-sharing and free-plan participants, as was the inappropriate use of antibiotics,” Rand reported. Nor did cost-sharing prompt subjects to seek out higher-quality care; the general quality of outpatient and dental care was “surprisingly low for all participants.”
Although Rand found “no adverse effect on participants’ health” from the reduction in services prompted by cost-sharing, the free plan led to better healthcare for plan members in four categories: improved control of hypertension, better vision care, better dental care for the poorest patients, and fewer serious health symptoms for the poorer patients, including less chest pain when exercising and fewer episodes of loss of consciousness.
Once cost-sharing became a standard element of American health insurance, Gaffney, Himmelstein and Woolhandler write, “the consequences were dire.”
The Heritage Foundation developed a model combining extreme deductibles and tax-advantaged savings accounts to pay the out-of-pocket expenses, which Heritage argued would “transform patients into prudent consumers.” The high-deductible/health savings account model was enacted into law, but plainly has failed to create an army of prudently cost-sensitive patients.
Co-pays and deductibles became permanently etched into employer-sponsored health plans. When the initial Rand findings were published, report Gaffney, Himmelstein and Woolhandler, only 30% of private health plans had a deductible for hospital stays; today 90% of workers with employer plans have annual deductibles averaging $1,735 per participant. Conservative governors and legislatures have tried to impose cost-sharing fees on patients in Medicaid, the nation’s healthcare program for low-income households.
And, of course, the cost-sharing revolution has utterly failed to control U.S. healthcare costs or bring about a healthier nation. Per capita healthcare spending in the U.S. has risen from about $350 in 1970 to $14, 470 in 2023. In inflation-adjusted terms, it has increased nearly sevenfold.
As for health outcomes, of 13 wealthy countries tracked by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the U.S. spends the most per capita by a wide margin and scrapes the bottom of the barrel on outcomes — the worst average life expectancy, worst infant mortality rate, worst rate of unmanaged diabetes, worst maternal mortality and nearly the worst heart attack mortality.
Obviously, the American healthcare system has many flaws other than its reliance on cost-sharing. But all its flaws are related in some way to its economic structure, which has produced legions of uninsured and underinsured people, as well as crushing medical debt for millions. (On Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made final a rule requiring medical debts to be removed from consumers’ credit reports. But the debts still remain.)
In recent years, the U.S. has started to get its arms around the uninsured crisis. That’s largely due to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which has brought access to Medicaid and subsidized health plans for about 42.5 million people. The uninsured rate fell from nearly 18% (or 46.5 million people) in 2010 to 9.5% (25.3 million) in 2023.
Can these gains be advanced and sustained? The incoming Trump administration doesn’t present grounds for optimism. In his first term, Donald Trump and his acolytes worked tirelessly to undermine the ACA and Medicaid. The number of uninsured rose to 28.9 million in 2019 from 26.7 million in 2016.
It would surprise no one if the new administration takes a hands-off approach to the increasing corporatization of healthcare, including the takeover of hospitals and nursing homes by penny-pinching private equity firms and the pushing of more Medicare enrollees to join private Medicare Advantage plans, which have become known for costing the government more than traditional Medicare, and for profit-seeking through claim denials.
Still, it’s the installation of cost-sharing as a medical management tool that harms people day in and day out. That the tool has never fulfilled its promise doesn’t seem to faze policymakers. On the surface, after all, it should work, shouldn’t it?
In November 2016, as Facebook was being blamed for a torrent of fake news and conspiracy theories swirling around the first election of Donald J. Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the social network, wrote an apologetic post.
In his message, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a series of steps he planned to take to grapple with false and misleading information on Facebook, such as working with fact-checkers.
“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” he wrote in a personal Facebook post. “There are many respected fact checking organizations,” he added, “and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.”
Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday, he announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was ending its fact-checking program and getting back to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said.
It was the latest step in a transformation of Mr. Zuckerberg. In recent years, the chief executive, now 40, has stepped away from his mea culpa approach to problems on his social platforms. Fed up with what has seemed at times to be unceasing criticism of his company, he has told executives close to him that he wants to return to his original thinking on free speech, which involves a lighter hand in content moderation.
Mr. Zuckerberg has remolded Meta as he has made the shift. Gone is the CrowdTangle transparency tool, which allowed researchers, academics and journalists to monitor conspiracy theories and misinformation on Facebook. The company’s election integrity team, once trumpeted as a group of experts focused solely on issues around the vote, has been folded into a general integrity team.
Instead, Mr. Zuckerberg has promoted technology efforts at Meta, including its investments in the immersive world of the so-called metaverse and its focus on artificial intelligence.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s change has been visible on his social media. Photos of him uncomfortably clad in a suit and tie and testifying before Congress have been replaced by videos of him with longer hair and in gold chains, competing in extreme sports and sometimes hunting for his own food. Long, heavily lawyered Facebook posts about Meta’s commitment to democracy no longer appear. Instead, he has posted quips on Threads responding to celebrity athletes and videos showing the company’s newest A.I. initiatives.
“This shows how Mark Zuckerberg is feeling that society is more accepting of those libertarian and right-leaning viewpoints that he’s always had,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. “This is an evolved return to his political origins.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has long been a pragmatist who has gone where the political winds have blown. He has flip-flopped on how much political content should be shown to Facebook and Instagram users, previously saying social networks should be about fun, relatable content from family and friends but then on Tuesday saying Meta would show more personalized political content.
Mr. Zuckerberg has told executives close to him that he is comfortable with the new direction of his company. He sees his most recent steps as a return to his original thinking on free speech and free expression, with Meta limiting its monitoring and controlling of content, said two Meta executives who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg in the last week.
Mr. Zuckerberg was never comfortable with the involvement of outside fact-checkers, academics or researchers in his company, one of the executives said. He now sees many of the steps taken after the 2016 election as a mistake, the two executives said.
“Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video on Tuesday about the end of the fact-checking program, echoing statements made by top Republicans over the years.
Meta declined to comment.
Those who have known Mr. Zuckerberg for decades describe him as a natural libertarian, who enjoyed reading books extolling free expression and the free market system after he dropped out of Harvard to start Facebook in 2004. As his company grew, so did pressure to become more responsive to complaints from world leaders and civil society groups that he was not doing enough to moderate content on his platform.
Crises including a genocide in Myanmar, in which Facebook was blamed for allowing hate speech to spread against the Muslim Rohingya people, forced Mr. Zuckerberg to expand moderation teams and define rules around speech on his social networks.
He was coached by people close to him, including Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to become more involved in politics. After the 2016 election, Mr. Zuckerberg embarked on a public campaign to clear his name and redeem his company. He held regular meetings with civic leaders and invited politicians to visit his company’s headquarters, rolled out transparency tools such as CrowdTangle and brought on fact-checkers.
In 2017, he announced that he was conducting a “listening tour” across the United States to “get a broader perspective” on how Americans used Facebook. The campaign-like photo opportunities with farmers and autoworkers led to speculation that he was running for political office.
Despite his efforts, Mr. Zuckerberg continued to be blamed for the misinformation and falsehoods that spread on Facebook and Instagram.
In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg began to push back. In an address at Georgetown University, he said Facebook had been founded to give people a voice.
“I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” he said.
In 2021, when the Jan. 6 riot broke out at the U.S. Capitol after the presidential election, Meta was again held responsible for hosting speech that fomented the violence. Two weeks later, Mr. Zuckerberg told investors that the company was “considering steps” to reduce political content across Facebook.
His evolution since then has been steady. Executives who pushed Mr. Zuckerberg to involve himself directly in politics, including Ms. Sandberg, have left the company. Those closest to him now cheer his focus on his own interests, which include extreme sports and rapping for his wife, as well as promoting his company’s A.I. initiatives.
In a podcast interview in San Francisco that Mr. Zuckerberg recorded live in front of an audience of 6,000 in September, he spoke for nearly 90 minutes about his love of technology. He said he should have rejected accusations that his company was responsible for societal ills.
“I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake,” he said. He added that it could take another decade for him to move his company’s brand back to where he wanted it.
“We’ll get through it, and we’ll come out stronger,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
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