After a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on its apps, including Facebook and Instagram.
As the US heads towards the November elections, Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.
Political content is underrepresented on Facebook, Instagram and Threads: app settings are automatically set to reduce the prominence of campaign and candidate posts users see, and Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the site, making it harder to find political misinformation on the platforms.
Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with election security chiefs as he once did, four employees said. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, though the company said election integrity workers have been merged into other teams. He also decided not to set up a “war room” that Mehta used to prepare for elections. Mehta said it plans to run an election operations center as the November vote draws closer.
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last month, Zuckerberg said he wanted to keep himself and his company out of politics, saying his goal was to be “neutral” and “not even appear to play a role.”
“This is a big change because 10 years ago, every employee at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, CEO of tech consulting firm Anchor Change, who previously worked at Facebook.
As a result, the near-constant barrage of headlines about Meta’s role in the political debate it faced in the past U.S. election has largely subsided, with the company instead recommending content to users about sports, cooking, animals and celebrity gossip.
During this election, online political conversations seem to be taking place more prominently on other platforms, including TikTok and Elon Musk’s X. The campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump have turned to niche TikTok creators to humanize their candidates and reach younger voters. Musk has posted almost daily about Trump, whom he supports as a presidential candidate, on X. Even the video conferencing app Zoom has become a major rallying point for grassroots political organizing.
However, political posts, images and videos have not disappeared from Meta’s apps, they are simply less prominent. Anyone can easily find them by searching for political groups and posts on Facebook or Instagram. Misinformation and conspiracy theories continue to circulate in private Facebook and WhatsApp groups, and the company continues to regularly remove disinformation campaigns from countries like Iran, China and Russia. During his debate with Harris in September, Trump spread a false story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their pets. The claim originated from a now-false Facebook post that has been shared millions of times.
Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Institute, a think tank that studies online misinformation, called Meta’s change of policy on politics a “stunning retreat.” But he said that while it’s now harder to find political posts, it doesn’t solve all of the content issues. “‘Explicit’ content like violence, sex, and drugs is available by default,” meaning users don’t have to opt in to see that kind of content, as they do with politics. Meta said it will continue to work with its safety and security teams to prevent policy violations.
Meta asserted that it is reducing political posts in its public feed and said engagement on its app remains strong as people want less political content, not more. The company’s user base is growing, and revenue continues to soar as it uses artificial intelligence to improve ad targeting.
“We’ve said for years that while people can continue to engage with political content on our platform if they want to, they want to see less politics overall, and that’s exactly what we’ve done,” Meta spokesperson Dani Lever said.
But she said that doesn’t mean Meta is trying less to combat disinformation: the company has 40,000 employees working on safety and security, has invested $20 billion in those areas since 2016, and has not reduced the number of employees working on elections, she said. This month, Meta banned Russian state media outlets Rossiya Segodnya and RT and their affiliates from posting on its app, citing “foreign interference activities” and disinformation campaigns against other countries.
“No other technology company is working harder to protect its platform,” Lever said, adding that “we have hundreds of people dedicated to election work.”
Meta was meant to have long since distanced itself from politics: Mr. Zuckerberg negotiated with lawmakers on and off between 2017 and 2021 after the company was accused of spreading Russian disinformation during the 2016 election.
Mr. Zuckerberg has apologized for years, including appearing before Congress, but he grew frustrated that the company had made little progress in his defense, according to four current and former Meta employees with knowledge of the internal deliberations. Meta has also become embroiled in partisan politics, with Democrats accusing Mr. Zuckerberg of not doing enough to curb problematic speech in the app and Republicans arguing the company has tried too hard.
Before the 2020 election, Mr. Zuckerberg told his staff that there was no higher priority than ensuring the security of the election, according to a senior executive close to him. He met with executives weekly to discuss the issue and directed hundreds of employees to work on ensuring the integrity of the election, including by fighting conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting.
Still, political conspiracy theories flourished on Facebook and Instagram, some of which were popularized by Trump, who after the 2020 election spread the false idea that it was stolen from him. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to “Stop the Steal” Facebook groups and spread inaccurate information that Trump had won the election.
As the Jan. 6 riots erupted, Mehta was accused of spreading misinformation about the election, and two weeks later, Zuckerberg told investors the company was “considering steps” to curtail political content across Facebook.
“People don’t want their experience at our services to be dominated by politics and infighting,” he said.
Meta has restructured its elections team ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, reducing its election staffing, four current and former employees said. The company also has tested reducing the amount of political content people see on Facebook, starting in Brazil and then other countries.
Between that year and 2023, Zuckerberg cut roughly a third of Meta’s workforce, with members of the integrity team being the first to be let go.
Last year, the company introduced Threads, a social platform that is widely seen as a competitor to X. Adam Mosseri, who oversees Threads and Instagram, was quick to post that both platforms “avoid any endorsements that may relate to politics or political issues.”
The app will no longer recommend political content to users from accounts they don’t follow, unless users explicitly turn on a setting embedded in the Instagram app menu, which is off by default.
Those decisions were driven by Mr. Zuckerberg, current and former Meta executives said. His personal posts on threads and Instagram tend to lean toward talking about technology while showing off his new look with gold chains and revamped outfits, and about his latest obsessions, like taking part in martial arts and fencing. There is little to no political content.
Instead of Mr. Zuckerberg’s weekly meetings, election issues have been largely delegated to Meta’s president of international operations, Nick Clegg, and chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, who have taken over day-to-day oversight of election security issues, according to two company executives.
Zuckerberg has focused nearly all of his public speaking on artificial intelligence, the metaverse and open-source technology.
It’s unclear whether this strategy will continue. Mehta has faced criticism from both parties for its role in political commentary after Zuckerberg sent his letter to Congress last month. And with both the Harris and Trump campaigns relying heavily on social media to engage voters, Mehta may find it difficult to shy away from the topic of politics.
“I think they realize that they can run, but they can’t hide,” said Harvath, the former Facebook employee, “so they need to have a plan for how they’re going to deal with it.”
