Zuckerberg debuts ‘real Mark’ in push to woo Trump

That’s the latest message the shape-shifting chief executive sought to relay to the masses as he pushes a frenzied effort to recast himself as a friend of the president-elect at a moment of peril and opportunity for Meta Platforms.

On Friday, Zuckerberg met with Trump in Florida for the second time in seven weeks and torched Meta’s longstanding diversity policies. Zuckerberg was at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club in part to mediate a lawsuit Trump brought against Facebook and Zuckerberg in 2021 over the platform’s suspension of Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter. Among the options for resolution is a monetary settlement.

Also on Friday, he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to trash the Biden administration and extol the benefits of masculinity in corporate leadership.

“I do think a lot of our society has become…kind of like, neutered, or like, emasculated," Zuckerberg said in an interview with the comedian and podcaster, who endorsed Trump just before the election. “When you’re running a company, people typically don’t want to see you being like this ruthless person," he said. He added that people who have seen him competing in jiu jitsu have remarked, “That’s the real Mark."

The day capped off the latest iteration of Zuckerberg’s inclination to “move fast and break things," a mantra he has used to steer himself and his company through crises for two decades.

The personal and companywide shifts go back a decade. After revelations of Russian election-interference in 2016, Zuckerberg appeared to embrace content-moderation initiatives he is now disbanding. He also completed a walking tour of 30 states in 2017. And in 2020, Meta and other companies moved aggressively to police election and pandemic-related discourse.

Taking advantage of Meta’s unique structure, which gives him majority control of voting shares at the $1.5 trillion company, Zuckerberg has worked with unique speed since the start of 2025 to head off attacks from a president-elect who last summer threatened to put him in prison for life. He has also won a seat at Trump’s table as a potential ban of rival TikTok hangs in the balance. The Chinese-owned social-media app accounts for roughly 4% of the entire digital-ads market in the U.S., according to estimates from eMarketer.

Zuckerberg was invited to the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration, a Meta spokesman confirmed on Monday, though he didn’t say whether the CEO would attend.

In recent weeks, others have resolved legal matters involving Trump. ABC News in December agreed to contribute $15 million to Trump’s presidential foundation or museum to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump against the network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos.

Zuckerberg’s decision to lavish attention on Trump comes as other tech titans have taken a welcoming posture toward the incoming First Couple. In January, Amazon.com’s Prime Video streaming service licensed what it said was a documentary about former and future first lady Melania Trump. It is being done with her cooperation and she will have an executive-producer credit on the movie. Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon, remains the company’s executive chairman.

Zuckerberg appears to be betting that advertisers, who are responding to the same cultural and political currents he is, won’t rebel against plans to unwind content-moderation policies that were put in place in part to protect their brands from having ads run next to content many users find repulsive.

Just this month, Zuckerberg appointed a new Republican head of global policy and added Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to Meta’s board of directors. He also said Meta would add political content back into user feeds, relax rules on hate speech and diminish the role of third-party fact-checkers on the company’s platforms.

The policy changes were implemented so quickly that they caught many senior managers off guard, and some are still trying to understand how they will be implemented.

It is the most recent of many pivots for a company that banned then-President Trump following the Jan. 6 turmoil at the Capitol in 2021, worked with the Biden administration during the pandemic to fact-check and take down posts regarding vaccines, and moved away from showing politics to users on its platforms last year. Meta also stoked fears about TikTok’s Chinese ownership in Washington during Trump’s first presidential term.

“Because I control our company, I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me," he told Rogan. In a normal corporate environment, CEOs are trying to persuade the board to “let them have their job and pay them more."

Zuckerberg has been trying to bolster his standing with Republicans for years, but the election accelerated his efforts. Not only did it bring Trump back to power, it also elevated rival Elon Musk—with whom Zuckerberg at one point tentatively agreed to fight in a cage match. Apple CEO Tim Cook, another Zuckerberg nemesis, has also maintained a strong relationship with Trump.

“I think a lot of people look at this as a purely political thing because they look at the timing and they’re like: ‘Hey, you’re doing this right after the election.’ It’s like, OK I try not to change our content rules right in the middle of an election either," Zuckerberg said on the Rogan podcast. “There’s no good time to do it."

Zuckerberg’s steps spotlight a significant change that has been under way in Silicon Valley during the past year. In recent years, executives such as Zuckerberg were rocked by employee strife after a pandemic-induced hiring boom. Internal discussion groups dealing with progressive causes flourished and workers at many companies pressured management to embrace diverse hiring goals, take a stand on “Black Lives Matter" after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and embrace other employee-driven initiatives.

Last week, some employee posts critical of Meta’s appointment of White to the board were deleted for violating Meta’s Community Engagement Expectations, which govern how employees speak about people in the workplace, including board members, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Online news outlet 404 Media earlier reported on the deleted discussion posts.

Despite the sweep of the announcements, managers in the company’s integrity division said answers about what the announcements mean for their work were in short supply. Formulated among a tight group of executives outside the company’s normal policy-drafting process, Zuckerberg’s announcements haven’t been followed by detailed descriptions of exactly what automated systems will be rolled back. Managers also remain unsure about what level of leniency is appropriate for penalizing edgy content and what will happen to recent work aimed at producing age-appropriate experiences for teenagers.

Internally, the reaction was met with dismay from some employees.

“Does this align with our free speech goals?" one employee pointedly asked in a Facebook workplace post after the company eliminated a Facebook Messenger filter that allowed people to express support for transgender and nonbinary people.

But the criticism fell far short of past controversies regarding Zuckerberg and politics, such as the uproar over the CEO’s handling of Trump’s post in response to the 2020 George Floyd protests that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Internal restrictions on discussions of controversial topics—along with a more active policy of censoring posts deemed to violate them—explained the more muted debate, Meta employees said, as did the company’s history of layoffs and reorganizations in teams focused on topics such as algorithmic discrimination and polarization.

Zuckerberg signaled during the Rogan podcast that he intends to shrug off any criticism for now, asserting that he has a better sense of how to handle content moderation in the future.

“My view at this point is like all right, we started off focused on free expression. We kind of had this pressure-tested over the last period. I feel like I just have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be and this is how it’s going to be going forward," he said.

Jeff Horwitz, Becky Peterson and Joseph Flint contributed to this article.

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com, Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com and Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com