Meta is allegedly curtailing internal criticism of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on Monday that Dana White would be added to its board of directors. 404 Media reported on the deletion of comments employees left on Workplace, an internal version of Facebook accessible to employees. Some of the comments highlighted video footage from 2022 showing White, an outspoken Trump supporter and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, slapping his wife at a New Year’s Eve party. He was never charged over the altercation.
According to 404, some employees expressed excitement about the appointment or made joking comments. One employee, for instance, wrote “W” while another wrote, “We hire Connor [McGregor] next for after work sparring?” Connor McGregor, a UFC fighter, was found guilty of sexual assault by a civil court after a woman accused him of rape in 2018.
Others were displeased by Meta’s decision and the celebratory comments from colleagues. “Kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape,” one employee commented. “I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on White and concluded that what he did is fine. I feel like I’m on another planet.”
Tech giants like Meta and Google were famous in their early days for allowing freewheeling internal discussions and dissent, believing that it would make them enjoyable places to work and lead to the best product decisions. But as these companies have metastasized into world-spanning companies with hundreds of thousands of employees, they have largely curtailed open discussion or employee protests. High-profile controversies like the anti-diversity memo written by a former Google employee caused much internal havoc and leadership teams across the industry eventually threw their hands up.
In removing the comments about White, a member of Meta’s “Internal Community Relationships” team explained to employees that they violated the company’s internal rules for discussion, called “Community Engagement Expectations.” “I’m posting a comment here with a reminder about the CEE, as multiple comments have been flagged by the community for review. It’s important that we maintain a respectful work environment where people can do their best work. We need to keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community—including members of our Board. Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE.”
Meta’s communications team stressed to 404 that the company has always had different rules for discussions internally and those that happen on its platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
Since winning re-election, Zuckerberg has been on a full-court press to please Trump, starting with a $1 million donation he made to his inauguration.
Following White’s appointment on Monday, Zuckerberg today made a series of announcements regarding content moderation in a video that can best be described as a masterclass in political theater. The announcements included that Meta would drop its fact-checking apparatus in favor of an X-style community notes system; leave a small moderation team in place which would be relocated from California to Texas “to eliminate bias”; allow political content on Facebook and Instagram again after suppressing it in recent years; and lift restrictions on content pertaining to discussion of gender and immigration.
On that last point, Meta updated its community guidelines to permit “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” In essence, it is now okay to suggest being homosexual is attributable to mental illness.
Besides concerns about misinformation and abuse posed by these changes, critics point out that Meta’s algorithms over-optimize on promoting rage-inducing content that garners high engagement. Opaque algorithms are arguably themselves a form of censorship—over on X, Elon Musk regularly tinkers with the algorithm to elevate whatever types of content he wants to see and suppress that which he does not like.
Put together, the moves by Zuckerberg kill two birds with one stone. He has long loathed being in the position of moderating the content on his platforms, and now he can stop doing so. And he can simultaneously appease Trump, who under his first administration threatened to lock Zuckerberg up for the rest of his life for his moderation of conservative content. But by working to please conservatives and placate Trump, he will have to deal with upset amongst the more liberal employees in his workforce.
Trump was asked about Zuckerberg’s decision to loosen content restrictions during a Mar-a-Lago press conference early Tuesday. After a journalist asked whether Trump believed Zuckerberg was making the changes in response to his previous threats, Trump responded, “probably.”
Did we mention a big antitrust case against Meta is heading to court in April? Trump could save Meta execs including Zuckerberg a lot of public grilling under oath.
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