Meta is continuing to roll back its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, from changing its own hiring practices to eliminating user themes that celebrated LGBTQ+ rights.
Fresh off its CEO meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, appointing Trump ally Joel Kaplan to lead policy and ending a years-long partnership with independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram, the social media company is suspending its diversity, equality and inclusion programs effective immediately, Axios reports.
Meta says it's axing the programs because the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing,” per a memo obtained by Axios.
In addition to letting go of the company’s dedicated DEI team, Meta will also end efforts to diversify vendors and end a hiring process that enables more diverse candidates to apply.
DEI, a broad term encompassing policies that promote inclusivity and equity in the workplace, has come under far-right fire in recent years, but Trump’s election has reignited a corporate frenzy to scrap the “woke” policies, as critics have labeled them.
Meta isn’t alone in scrapping DEI policies — McDonald’s, Ford, and others have pared back equity efforts — but the move coincides with several other major changes that suggest CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all-in on Trump.
Zuckerberg is making major efforts to win back the online right and draw Trump’s attention, all as Meta’s fiercest competitor, TikTok, faces a ban that the president-elect has promised to stop.
Earlier this week, Meta revised content moderation policies to allow a wider array of hateful speech, The Intercept reported. The publication reported that internal documents it obtained instruct moderators to now allow posts containing phrases like “trans people are mentally ill” or “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of s—t.”
Kaplan, the chief global affairs officer at Meta, explained on Tuesday that Meta was easing the speech restrictions on “immigration, gender identity and gender” to keep up with shifting political narratives.
“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Kaplan wrote in a statement, adding that automated systems would no longer be used to target hateful content, just user reports.
The company went further than simply unleashing more hate on immigrants and queer Meta customers. 404 Media reported on Friday that the company even pulled back its trans and nonbinary-themed backgrounds on its Messenger platform.
The Meta CEO is just one of multiple big tech leaders lining up to appease the president-elect. Amazon, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Apple’s Tim Cook coughed up $1 million each for Trump’s inauguration, while X owner Elon Musk exerts an unprecedented level of influence over his transition.
Meta also added former WWE executive Dana White, who introduced Trump at the Republican National Convention this summer, to its board on Monday, and chipped in a $1 million sum to the inauguration.
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