Less than a week after Meta said it would abandon its fact-checking program because fact-checkers have been “too politically biased,” the social media giant is telling employees that it will immediately drop multiple initiatives aimed at boosting diversity within the company.
A memo announcing the end of its “Diverse Slate Approach” was shared to an internal forum on Friday by Janelle Gale, the vice president of human resources at Meta Platforms, which owns services like Facebook and Instagram. As part of that program, hiring managers had been expected to “consider candidates from underrepresented backgrounds when interviewing for an open position.” Though the approach is now being discarded, the company “will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds,” the memo said.
Gale added that Meta will also get rid of its team focused on DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion.
“The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing,” she wrote, in what many saw as a tacit acknowledgment that the shift is meant to appease the incoming GOP presidential administration.
“The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged,” Gale said, “in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
The announcement comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke with President-elect Donald Trump at his Florida estate in November. Following that meeting, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
In a video shared online Tuesday, Zuckerberg had said it was time for Meta “to get back to our roots around free expression” and claimed he “started building social media to give people a voice.” (Zuckerberg’s precursor to Facebook, a site known as Facemash, existed for the purpose of ranking the attractiveness of his classmates at Harvard.)
In addition to spiking its DEI team and ending practices like the Diverse Slate Approach, Gale’s memo reaffirmed that Meta has already done away with “representation goals for women and ethnic minorities” and announced an end to “supplier diversity efforts.”
“This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy,” Gale said.
The memo was first reported by Axios, which published the document in full.
Meta’s abrupt shift dovetails with its new content moderation guidelines that permit various types of hateful and dehumanizing remarks targeting transgender people, immigrants and women.
Tech journalist Casey Newton highlighted some of the alarming changes in a Thursday article on the news site Platformer, publishing a set of examples ― created by Meta for internal training of moderators ― of exactly the type of posts it now allows:
“There’s no such thing as trans children.”
“God created two genders, ‘transgender’ people are not a real thing.”
“This whole nonbinary thing is made up. Those people don’t exist, they’re just in need of some therapy.”
“A trans woman isn’t a woman, it’s a pathetic confused man.”
“A trans person isn’t a he or she, it’s an it.”
In a separate but related development flagged by the publication 404 Media, Meta deleted the “trans” and “nonbinary” themes from its Messenger app this week. Themes allow users to change the appearance of chat windows, such as by altering the color or design.
Other themes, like ones celebrating “Basketball,” “Minecraft” and “Love,” remain.