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.
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The Justice Department is turning to former Trump attorney Joeseph diGenova to spearhead a probe into ex-CIA Director John Brennan and others over the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, as the department reshuffles leadership of the sprawling inquiry.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has tapped diGenova to serve as counsel overseeing the matter, according to a New York Times report, putting a former Trump attorney in a key role in the high-profile probe. A federal grand jury seated in Miami has been impaneled since late last year.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
DOJ ACTIVELY PREPARING TO ISSUE GRAND JURY SUBPOENAS RELATING TO JOHN BRENNAN INVESTIGATION: SOURCES
Joseph diGenova represented President Donald Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, has repeatedly accused Brennan of misconduct tied to the origins of the Russia probe—allegations that have not resulted in criminal charges.
He also said in a 2018 appearance on Fox News that Brennan colluded with the FBI and DOJ to frame Trump.
The origins of the Russia investigation have been the subject of ongoing scrutiny by Trump allies, who have argued that intelligence and law enforcement officials improperly launched the probe.
BRENNAN INDICTMENT COULD COME WITHIN ‘WEEKS’ AS PROSECUTORS REQUEST OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPTS
Joseph diGenova has previously said that ex-CIA chief John Brennan colluded with the FBI and DOJ to frame Trump. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
DiGenova’s appointment follows the ouster of Maria Medetis Long, a national security prosecutor in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office. She had been overseeing the inquiry, including a false statements probe related to Brennan and broader conspiracy-related investigations.
As the investigation continues, federal investigators have issued subpoenas seeking information related to intelligence assessments of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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John Brennan has denied any wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation. (William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images; Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Brennan has previously denied wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation and has defended the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election.
Politics
Supreme Court weighs phone searches to find criminals amid complaints of ‘digital dragnets’
WASHINGTON — A man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia in May 2019 and demanded cash.
He left with $195,000 in a bag and no clue to his identity. But his smartphone was keeping track of him.
What happened next could yield a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on the 4th Amendment and its restrictions against “unreasonable searches.” The court will hear arguments on the issue on April 27.
Typically, police use tips or leads to find suspects, then seek a search warrant from a judge to enter a house or other private area to seize the evidence that can prove a crime.
Civil libertarians say the new “digital dragnets” work in reverse.
“It’s grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That’s opposite of how our system has worked, and it’s really dangerous,” said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.
But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals.
Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a “groundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.”
Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a “geofence warrant,” referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time.
The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.
Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal next week.
The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment.
The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned.
This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.
Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment.
Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled “geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.”
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing.
The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants.
Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie’s “private location information … with an unconstitutional general warrant that compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.”
Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie’s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.
“There was no search here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data.
He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant.
Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, “surely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one’s public movements” is not private either.
Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data.
Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to “frustrate law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals” or cause “more cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,” he wrote.
Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount.
The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank.
After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen.
The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder.
That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the “novelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.”
The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance.
By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.
The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment.
The “seismic shifts in technology” could permit total surveillance of the public, Roberts wrote, and “we decline to grant the state unrestricted access” to these databases.
But he described the Carpenter decision as “narrow” because it turned on the many weeks of surveillance data.
In dissent, four conservatives questioned how tracking someone’s driving violates their privacy. Surveillance cameras and license plate readers are commonly used by investigators and have rarely been challenged.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer relies on that argument in his defense of Chatrie’s conviction. “An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see,” he wrote.
The justices will issue a decision by the end of June.
Politics
Trump renews bridge, power plant threat against Iran in push for deal, mocks ‘tough guy’ IRGC
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President Donald Trump mocked the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on Sunday morning for staking claim to a Strait of Hormuz “blockade” the U.S. military had already put in place.
“Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing.
“In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be ‘the tough guy!’”
Trump declared Saturday’s IRGC fire was “a total violation” of the ceasefire.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” his post began.
“Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it? My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations.”
Trump remains hopeful about diplomacy, but is not ruling out a return to force, where he once warned about ending “civilation” in Iran as they know it.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” Trump’s stern warning continued.
“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
“They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!”
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