In a sweeping transformation aligned with Project 2025’s authoritarian vision, Meta is simultaneously dismantling its content moderation infrastructure and terminating its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs just days before Donald Trump returns to the White House. These changes, detailed in internal memos obtained by both The Intercept and Axios represent a fundamental shift in the company’s operations and culture.
Source: Facebook
The announcement of Meta’s new direction came four years to the day after founder Mark Zuckerberg banned Donald Trump from Facebook. The social media company’s new policies align directly with Project 2025’s blueprint for dismantling what it terms “government censorship infrastructure.” The Mandate for Leadership specifically calls for ending programs that counter misinformation and disinformation, targeting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for what it describes as expanding “into lanes where it does not belong, the most recent and most glaring example being censorship of so-called misinformation and disinformation.”
Censorship, they argue, infringes on religious freedom as well as the right to freedom of speech. “The United States government and, by extension, the FBI have absolutely no business policing speech, whether in the public square, in print, or online. The First Amendment prohibits it.”
The company’s DEI rollback, announced in a memo from VP of Human Resources Janelle Gale, includes five major changes: eliminating Meta’s DEI team, ending equity and inclusion programs, discontinuing supplier diversity efforts, terminating the “Diverse Slate Approach” to hiring, and ending representation goals. The memo cites changes in “the legal and policy landscape” as justification.
But the change in policy also plays right into Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist playbook, which calls for “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Many Project 2025 supporters claim that “anti-white” racism is America’s biggest civil rights issue.
A recent addition to Meta’s policy team is Dustin Carmack, Meta’s director of public policy, southern and southeastern, U.S., a former Heritage Foundation fellow and author of Project 2025’s Intelligence Community chapter.
In Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Carmack, who joined Meta in April 2024, advocates removing nonpartisan processes across government institutions, providing context for Meta’s current direction. “Future [Intelligence Community] leadership must address the widely promoted ‘woke’ culture that has spread throughout the federal government with identity politics and ‘social justice’ advocacy replacing such traditional American values as patriotism, colorblindness, and even workplace competence,” he wrote.
More than a year before joining Meta, Carmack outlined an aggressive vision for institutional transformation, laying out a comprehensive plan for reshaping government agencies to ensure alignment with presidential priorities. His blueprint argued that if senior leadership finds any program “inconsistent with the President’s agenda, the Director should immediately halt that program or operation.”
Carmack’s Project 2025 vision called for fundamental changes to personnel management, advocating that agency directors should use their authority to expedite security clearances for aligned personnel while removing those who have “abused their positions of trust.” With the recent shift at Meta, Project 2025’s agenda is coming to fruition in the corporate and media sectors.
The connection between Meta’s new policies and Project 2025’s agenda is most evident in the company’s approach to LGBTQ+ content, even in the derogatory language it used to announce its new policies.
Meta’s new content rules explicitly state: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” This policy shift aligns with Project 2025’s vision, which equates transgender identity with pornography — railing against the “new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet “gender-affirming care” and “sex-change” surgeries on minors — and calls for registering educators who discuss transgender identity as sex offenders.
Project 2025 supporters include organizations that exclusively refer to transgender identity as an ideology similar to a political theory, or “gender dysphoria” indicating a mental illness, including Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, and the American Principles Project.
Meta’s content moderation changes, detailed in training materials obtained by The Intercept, show a dramatic shift in permitted speech on Meta’s platforms. New rules allow previously prohibited content related to race, nationality, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities. It’s a license to commit digital violence on minority communities.
Examples of newly permissible content on Facebook and Instagram include:
- “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit”
- “Gays are freaks”
- “Mexican immigrants are trash!”
- “I’m a proud racist”
- “Italians are dickheads”
- “These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals”
- “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today.
- “Japanese are all Yakuza”
- “Trans people are immoral”
- “Gay people are sinners”
- “Blacks are more violent than Whites”
- “Black people as farm equipment”
- “Transgender or non-binary people as ‘it’”
The training materials specify that some restrictions remain. For example:
- Comparisons to animals or pathogens (like “All Syrian refugees are rodents”) remain prohibited
- “Black people are all drug dealers” remains banned
- Posts containing “targeting cursing” using variants of the word “fuck” at protected groups are not allowed
- Claims about intellectual superiority without evidence remain prohibited, such as “White people are more intelligent than black people”
The document indicates that Meta will still prohibit “direct attacks” against people based on protected characteristics, though The Intercept reports that the definition of what constitutes a direct attack has been significantly narrowed. Meta will also make greater use of algorithms to identify violative content, a method that has had dismal results in the past.
The company has also eliminated third-party fact-checkers and is relocating content moderation teams from California to Texas, which will “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Meta’s transformation includes significant personnel changes beyond Carmack. Joel Kaplan, a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush, has replaced Nick Clegg as chief global affairs officer. The company has also added UFC president Dana White, a Trump ally, to its board and pledged a $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration.
These changes at Meta mirror broader corporate shifts, with companies like McDonald’s and Walmart also rolling back DEI programs. Anti-DEI shareholder proposals have tripled since 2020, Axios reports, reflecting a wider transformation in corporate America ahead of Trump’s return to office.
This comprehensive overhaul of Meta’s policies and practices represents an early implementation of Project 2025’s vision for reshaping American and global institutions and the public narrative, starting with one of its largest social media platforms.
