What Mark Zuckerberg is changing Meta for the Trump era

At this point, it’s pretty clear what Donald Trump wants from Mark Zuckerberg. But what does Zuckerberg, who has now gone to Mar-a-Lago twice since the November election, want from the President-elect?

That’s the question I’ve been asking sources in and around Meta over the last several days. They all described Meta’s relationship with the outgoing Biden administration as incredibly hostile. It’s safe to assume that Zuckerberg wants a reset for the MAGA regime, especially since Trump threatened not that long ago to imprison him for life. 

In Trump’s America, removing tampons from the mens’ restrooms on Meta’s campuses, — a real thing that just happened — is as much a business decision as a political one. Destroying ‘woke’ ideology is a key pillar of Trump’s stated mandate. Others who know they need to play the game, like Amazon, are also starting to fall in line. Even still, Zuckerberg is transforming Meta for this new political reality at a speed that’s unusual for a company of its size and influence. Founder mode.

In his conversation with Joe Rogan and his video on Instagram, Zuckerberg shares a laundry list of issues that Trump could help him with: fighting other countries that are ratcheting up their policing of his platforms, stopping Apple from dictating how he builds mobile apps and smart glasses (the latter is increasingly important to Meta’s future), and, perhaps most importantly, keeping domestic AI regulation from slowing his efforts to crush OpenAI. Elon Musk has bought Trump’s ear. But the more time Zuckerberg spends in Mar-a-Lago, the more Sam Altman and Tim Cook should be worried.

Then there’s the US government’s case to break up Meta that’s set to go to trial in a few months. After the blur that was the last four years, it’s easy to forget that this lawsuit was filed at the end of Trump’s first term by a Republican FTC chair, not Lina Khan…

Most of the headline reactions from the past week have focused on Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s third-party fact check program. It was a convenient scapegoat for company executives that, frankly, never lived up to the goal of bringing more neutrality to Facebook and Instagram. The Community Notes alternative Meta is cribbing from X was not on the product roadmap before this week, so it will probably be awhile before everyone sees it in the wild. 

The announcement that US moderators would be moved from California to Texas is perhaps the most cynical of them all; talk to anyone who knows and they’ll tell you the vast majority of moderators are already based in Austin.

The hateful speech that is now allowed on Meta’s is eye-popping on its face and will be deserving of more scrutiny in the coming weeks. The decision to start recommending political content again is a 180-degree turn for Zuckerberg. But insiders believe that the most impactful change for users of Meta’s apps will be the softening of its systems that remove content for potential policy violations. 

Out of all the announcements Meta made last week, this is the one I believe is the least connected to Trump. Meta execs have been signaling for a while that they know they are mistakenly removing too much content that doesn’t actually break the rules; I’m told it’s one of, if not the, biggest complaint in user surveys. If done correctly, dialing back on moderation mistakes may be the only thing Zuckerberg announced that makes everyone happy.

• CES is for dealmaking now: Each year, the official CES show — the sprawling show floor and flashy keynotes — feels more like an advertising exercise and no longer a place to launch real products. Most of the energy has moved to private meeting rooms and happy hours at the Wynn, Aria, and Cosmopolitan, where tech execs are schmoozing CMOs and getting deals done with partners all week. At this shadow CES, everyone seems to agree that the show is more alive than ever. Booths on the show floor have become marketing tools to show clients before you take them to a steak dinner. The challenge for the organizers of CES will be figuring out how to bridge the growing influence of this part of the show with their current business model of charging people to walk around booths filled with smart toasters and concept cars.
• TikTok may just get banned: Imagine an alternate world in which the Chinese government is about to ban Instagram from operating in the country and Mark Zuckerberg is in hiding. That’s the situation with ByteDance and its founder Zhang Yiming, who stepped down from the CEO role after the last US ban attempt but still controls the company. He let TikTok be banned in India and seemingly has no interest in the app surviving this time, so why wouldn’t he let the same thing happen again?
• Google and OpenAI flick at what’s next: Google’s DeepMind unit is starting “an ambitious project to build generative models that simulate the physical world,” which it believes “is on the critical path to artificial general intelligence.” Meanwhile, OpenAI is returning to its early roots by starting a “general-purpose robotics” team that will build hardware and push “towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings.” We may have hit a scaling wall on text data but the big labs clearly see an opportunity in 3D. (See also what Nvidia announced last week.)
• Other headlines you may have missed: Tencent (a large investor in Epic Games, Snap, and US tech companies) was put on the Pentagon’s blacklist for being allegedly under the influence of the Chinese military. Tim Cook’s total compensation rose 18 percent last year to $74.6 million. Elon Musk is hosting an inauguration party for Trump in DC with Uber and The Free Press. Sam Altman’s sister filed a sexual abuse lawsuit against him.

Some recent, noteworthy job changes in the tech world:

• A bunch of changes at Meta: UFC CEO Dana White, Exor CEO John Elkann, and Charlie Songhurst joined the board. Joel Kaplan is running policy and comms now. After a stint at Google, I’m told Michael Levinson is coming back as VP of product for the Integrity org. (Good luck!) Head of civil rights, Roy Austin, is leaving. And former DEI chief Maxine Williams is now head of “accessibility and engagement.”
• Elon Musk’s X named a couple of new leaders: Romina Khananisho is the new head of government affairs and John Nitti is head of “ad innovation.”
• Calista Redmon joined Nvidia as VP of “global AI initiatives,” where she’ll “drive adoption of the NVIDIA platform for national and regional AI initiatives.”
• Sophia Dominguez, Snap’s director of AR platform, is leaving.

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