Politics
Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era
Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy.
Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his handpicked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to work, while Mr. Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the island of Kauai.
By New Year’s Day, Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to go public with the changes, according to four current and former Meta employees and advisers with knowledge of the events, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions.
The entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters policies that govern its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any shifts generally take months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.
On Tuesday, most of Meta’s 72,000 employees learned of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plans along with the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant said it was overhauling speech on its apps by loosening restrictions on how people can talk about contentious social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking program that had been aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to police falsehoods. And it said it would insert more political content into people’s feeds after previously de-emphasizing that very material.
In the days since, the moves — which have sweeping implications for what people will see online — have drawn applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives, derision from fact-checking groups and misinformation researchers, and concerns from L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups that fear the changes will lead to more people getting harassed online and offline.
Inside Meta, the reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees have celebrated the moves, while others were shocked and have openly castigated the changes on the company’s internal message boards. Several employees wrote that they were ashamed to work for Meta.
On Friday, Meta’s makeover continued when the company told employees that it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated its chief diversity officer role, ended its diversity hiring goals that called for the employment of a certain number of women and minorities, and said it would no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring vendors.
Meta planned to “focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post that was relayed to The New York Times.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisers to Mr. Zuckerberg described his shift as serving a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the political landscape of the moment, with conservative power ascendant in Washington as Mr. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. More than that, the changes reflect Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal views of how his $1.5 trillion company should be run — and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, has regularly spoken to friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are policing speech, the people said. He has also felt railroaded by what he views as the Biden administration’s anti-tech posturing, and stung by what he sees as progressives in the media and in Silicon Valley — including in Meta’s work force — pushing him to take a heavy hand in policing discourse, they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was time to go “back to our original mission” by giving people “the power to share.” He said he had felt pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding, “I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and this is how it’s going to be going forward.”
The latest changes were catalyzed by Mr. Trump’s victory in November. That month, Mr. Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund.
At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg began preparing to change speech policies. Knowing that any moves would be contentious, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy executive with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, the head of U.S. policy; and David Ginsberg, the head of communications. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted on no leaks, the people with knowledge of the effort said.
The group worked on revising Meta’s “Hate Speech” policy, with Mr. Zuckerberg leading the charge, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which lays out what to do with slurs, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to “Hateful Conduct.”
That effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from speech, minimizing Meta’s role in policing online conversation. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were cheerleaders of the changes, these people said.
Mr. Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr. Kaplan to Meta’s head of global public policy to carry out the changes and deepen Meta’s ties to the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain who had handled policy and regulatory issues globally for Meta since 2018. The night before Meta’s announcement, Mr. Kaplan held individual calls with top conservative social media influencers, two people said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg made the new speech policies public in his Instagram video. Mr. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of Mr. Trump’s media diet, saying Meta’s fact-checking partners “had too much political bias.”
(Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.)
Among its changes, Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including permitting “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” The company cited political discourse about transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that forbade users to say people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.
Some training materials that Meta created for the new policies were confusing and contradictory, two employees who reviewed the documents said. Some of the text said saying that “white people have mental illness” would be prohibited on Facebook, but saying that “gay people have mental illness” was allowed, they said.
Meta locked access to the policies and training materials internally late on Thursday, they said, hours after The Intercept published excerpts.
The company also removed the transgender and nonbinary “themes” on its Messenger chat app, which allows users to customize the app’s colors and wallpaper, two employees said. The change was reported earlier by 404 Media.
That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.
Some employees were livid at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy division typically view and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.
On Workplace, Meta’s Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing over the changes. In the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support L.G.B.T.Q. issues convene, at least one person announced their resignation as others privately relayed to one another that they planned to look for jobs elsewhere, two people said.
In a post this week to the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, defended Mr. Zuckerberg and said topics like transgender issues had become politicized. He said Meta’s policies should not get in the way of allowing societal debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of “courts getting ahead of society” in the 1970s. Mr. Schultz said the courts had “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be debated civically.
“You find topics become politicized and stay in the political conversation for far longer than they would’ve if society just debated them out,” Mr. Schultz wrote. He said looser restrictions on speech in Meta’s apps would allow for this kind of debate.
Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., this week, four people with knowledge of his activities said, and on Friday was said to have been at Mar-a-Lago.
In his interview with Mr. Rogan, Mr. Zuckerberg denied making sweeping changes to appease the incoming Trump administration, but said the election did influence his thinking.
“The good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this cultural pulse,” he said. “We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn’t say that were just mainstream discourse.”
Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.
Politics
Mamdani’s response to Trump’s Iran strike sparks conservative backlash: ‘Rooting for the ayatollah’
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New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing blowback from conservatives on social media over his post condemning the U.S. attack on Iran that led to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
On Saturday, as a joint strike on Iran by the United States and Israel was developing, Mamdani blasted the Trump administration’s decision in a post on X that has been viewed roughly 20 million times.
“Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” Mamdani wrote.
“Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Mamdani said Americans prefer “relief from the affordability crisis” before speaking directly to Iranians in New York City.
“You are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders,” Mamdani said. “You will be safe here.”
The post was quickly slammed by conservatives on social media making the case that Mamdani’s response appeared sympathetic to Iran’s brutal regime and pointing to his lack of public reaction to the Iranian protesters killed in recent years.
“Comrade Mayor is rooting for the Ayatollah,” GOP Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. “They can chant together.”
OBAMA OFFICIAL WHO BACKED IRAN DEAL SPARKS ONLINE OUTRAGE WITH REACTION TO TRUMP’S STRIKE: ‘SIT THIS ONE OUT’
“Do u say anything pro American ?” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade posted on X. “do u know any Iranians – ? they hate @fr_Khamenei they celebrate his death, you should be celebrating his death ! hes killed thousands of American’s and just killed 30k Iranians, did u even say a word about that? You are an embarrassment !! Please quit.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questions Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Hart building Jan. 15, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“I don’t feel safe in New York listening to someone like you, Mamdani, who sympathizes with the regime that killed more than 30,000 unarmed Iranians in less than 24 hours,” Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad posted on X.
“We Iranians do not allow you to lecture us about war while you had nothing to say when the Islamic Republic shot schoolgirls and blinded more than 10,000 innocent people in the streets. You were busy celebrating the hijab while women of my beloved country Iran were jailed and raped by Islamic Security forces for removing it.
“And NOW you find your voice to defend the regime? No. I will not let you claim the moral high ground. The people of Iran want to be free. Where were you when they needed solidarity?”
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“How is it that you can’t differentiate between good and evil?” Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted on X. “Why is this so hard for you?”
“It takes a particular kind of audacity, or ignorance, for a city mayor to appoint himself the conscience of American foreign policy while his constituents step over garbage on their way to work,” GOP Rep. Nancy Mace posted on X. “History will not remember his bravery. It will not remember him at all.”
“Iranian New Yorkers are thrilled today and see right through you,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino posted on X.
Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management LP, speaks during the WSJ D.Live global technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., Oct. 17, 2017. (Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
“When Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, Bahrain all support today’s operation eliminating world’s #1 sponsor of terror, but New York City’s Mayor @ZohranMamdani is shilling for Iran,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov posted on X.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office for comment.
Shortly after Mamdani’s post, it was announced by President Trump and Israeli officials that the military operation resulted in Khamenei’s death.
Israeli leaders confirmed Khamenei’s compound and offices were reduced to rubble early Saturday after a targeted strike in downtown Tehran.
“Khamenei was the contemporary Middle East’s longest-serving autocrat. He did not get to be that way by being a gambler. Khamenei was an ideologue, but one who ruthlessly pursued the preservation and protection of his ideology, often taking two steps forward and one step back,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of FDD’s Iran program, told Fox News Digital.
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WASHINGTON — For a decade, President Trump promised to end what he calls forever wars, casting himself as a leader opposed to prolonged conflicts in the Middle East and who would rather pursue peace in the world.
Now, early in his second term, Trump is taking military action against Iran that could expand well beyond a limited effort to halt the country’s nuclear program.
In a video posted on Truth Social, the commander in chief said American forces also plan to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” He warned members of Iran’s military to surrender or “face certain death.” And urged the Iranian people to take the moment as an opportunity to rise up against their government.
“This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces,” Trump said.
A few hours after relaying that message, Trump confirmed in a separate social media post that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, was among those killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes. Even with his death, Trump said that “the heavy and pinpoint bombing” would continue in Iran “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
Trump, who has been considering a strike on Iran for several weeks, acknowledged he reached the decision to attack Iran while aware of the human toll that could come with it.
“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war,” he said. “But we are doing this, not for now, we are doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”
Trump’s military campaign in Iran is a sharp turn in tone for a president who has long been critical of open-ended conflicts in the Middle East, and marks a shift from an America-first agenda message that helped him return to the White House.
“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Trump said in his November 2024 victory speech as he promised to focus national resources on domestic priorities rather than foreign conflicts.
As Trump advocated to bring home American forces from deployments around the world and to withdraw from key defense treaties, his position resonated with a war-weary electorate in the lead-up to the election.
Fewer than six in 10 Americans (56%) believed the United States should take an active role in world affairs ahead of the election — the second-lowest level recorded since the question was first asked in 1974, according to polling by the Council on Foreign Affairs.
Trump’s posture on war in the Middle East had been largely consistent before he ran for office.
In 2013, he criticized then-President Obama’s negotiations with Tehran, predicting in a post on Twitter that Obama would “attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly.” That same year, Trump warned that “our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.”
And in a heated February 2016 debate, Trump attacked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, stating that his brother George W. Bush lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities to get the U.S. into the Iraq war. Trump called the Iraq war a “big, fat mistake” that “destabilized the Middle East.”
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none,” he said.
At the time of the Iraq war, however, Trump had said he supported it.
Trump’s confrontation with Iran bears little resemblance to his earlier rebukes.
Trump has yet to present evidence of an imminent threat to the United States from Iran’s nuclear program — a capability he claimed to have “obliterated” just eight months ago — and has instead framed the military campaign as one to ensure Tehran never develops nuclear weapons at all.
“It is a very simple message,” he said. “They will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump’s shift has already drawn the attention of congressional Democrats, many of whom are calling the president out for backing out on his promise to end foreign wars — and are demanding that he involve Congress in any further military actions.
“Regardless of what the President may think or say, he does not enjoy a blank check to launch large-scale military operations without a clear strategy, without any transparency or public debate, and not without Congressional approval,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) criticized Trump for “drawing the country into yet another foreign war that Americans don’t want and Congress has not authorized.”
The military involvement in Iran is not the first time that members of Congress have complained about the Trump administration’s willingness to sideline the legislative branch on decisions that could trigger broader conflicts this year.
In January, Trump ordered military forces to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and said the United States would run the sovereign nation until further notice. He threatened military action in Colombia, whose leftist President Gustavo Petro has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics.
Trump has alienated allied nations when he said he was willing to send American troops to seize Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. And on Friday, he said U.S. is in talks with Havana and raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba” without offering any details on what he meant.
His actions have coincided with his annoyance at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At one point, the president said he no longer felt an “obligation to think purely of Peace” because he didn’t get the recognition.
Trump’s shifting tone, and his use of violent war imagery in his pretaped remarks about Iran, have rattled even part of his base.
“I did not campaign for this. I did not donate money for this,” said former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative who recently left Congress after a bitter fight with Trump. “This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be. Shame!”
Republican leaders, however, are largely standing behind the president.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Iran “posed a clear and unacceptable threat” to the United States and has refused “the diplomatic off-ramps.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (D-La.) said Trump took the action after exhausting “every effort to pursue peaceful and diplomatic solutions.”
Other top Republican lawmakers rallied behind Trump, too.
“The butcher’s bill has finally come due for the ayatollahs,” Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote in a post on X. “May God bless and protect our troops on this vital mission of vengeance, and justice, and safety.”
Politics
Iran fires missiles at US bases across Middle East after American strikes on nuclear, IRGC sites
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Iran launched missile and drone strikes targeting U.S. military facilities in multiple Middle Eastern countries Friday, retaliating after coordinated U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iranian military and nuclear-linked sites.
Explosions were reported in or near areas hosting American forces in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Jordan, according to regional officials and state media accounts. Several of those governments said their air defense systems intercepted incoming projectiles.
It remains unclear whether any U.S. service members were killed or injured, and the extent of potential damage to American facilities has not yet been confirmed. U.S. officials have not publicly released casualty figures or formal damage assessments.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) described the operation as a direct response to what Tehran called “aggression” against Iranian territory earlier in the day. Iranian officials claimed they targeted U.S. military infrastructure and command facilities.
Explosions were reported in or near areas hosting American forces in Bahrain, pictured above. (Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Adelola Tinubu/U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. 5th Fleet )
The United States military earlier carried out strikes against what officials described as high-value Iranian targets, including IRGC facilities, naval assets and underground sites believed to be associated with Iran’s nuclear program. One U.S. official told Fox News that American forces had “suppressed” Iranian air defenses in the initial wave of strikes.
Tomahawk cruise missiles were used in the opening phase of the U.S. operation, according to a U.S. official. The campaign was described as a multi-geographic operation designed to overwhelm Iran’s defensive capabilities and could continue for multiple days. Officials also indicated the U.S. employed one-way attack drones in combat for the first time.
IF KHAMENEI FALLS, WHO TAKES IRAN? STRIKES WILL EXPOSE POWER VACUUM — AND THE IRGC’S GRIP
Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following strikes by the United States and Israel against Iran, in Manama, Bahrain, Feb. 28, 2026. (Reuters)
Iran’s retaliatory barrage targeted countries that host American forces, including Bahrain — home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet — as well as Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base and the UAE’s Al Dhafra Air Base. Authorities in those nations reported intercepting many of the incoming missiles. At least one civilian was killed in the UAE by falling debris, according to local authorities.
Iranian officials characterized their response as proportionate and warned of additional action if strikes continue. A senior U.S. official described the Iranian retaliation as “ineffective,” though independent assessments of the overall impact are still developing.
Smoke rises over the city after the Israeli army launched a second wave of airstrikes on Iran in Tehran on Feb. 28, 2026. (Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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Regional governments condemned the strikes on their territory as violations of sovereignty, raising the risk that additional countries could become directly involved if escalation continues.
The situation remains fluid, with military and diplomatic channels active across the region. Pentagon officials are expected to provide further updates as damage assessments and casualty reviews are completed.
Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
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Iran fires missiles at US bases across Middle East after American strikes on nuclear, IRGC sites
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