Inside Mark Zuckerberg's sprint to remake Meta for the Trump era

Discussions on changing firm's approach to online speech kept to small circle of people

- Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Kate Conger

Mr Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.

In December 2024, Mr Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer 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 Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida over Thanksgiving. Now, he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy.

Over the next few weeks, Mr Zuckerberg and his hand-picked 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 Hawaiian 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 Jan 7, most of Meta's 72,000 employees learned of Mr Zuckerberg's plans along with the rest of the world.