On Friday, January 10, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, announced that the company would end its major diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) programs to ensure that it would be “building teams with the most talented people.” The move followed the company’s decision to fire fact-checkers in favor of AI-backed “community notes”-style features.
“This is ultimately about doing what’s best for our company and ensuring that we are serving everyone and building teams with the most talented people,” Kaplan told Fox News Digital. “This means evaluating people as individuals and sourcing people from a range of candidate pools, but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics like race or gender.”
Questioning the Legal Importance of Inclusion
Rather than retaining policies that give each new candidate a fair shot at employment despite existing biases against specific individuals, Meta appears to feel they should not be restricted from choosing from majority groups when they might be more outwardly qualified. Some imply that DEI initiatives detract from the hard work of advantaged group members by acknowledging bias, discrimination, and inequality.
However, Kaplan pointed out that recent Supreme Court decisions signal “a shift in how courts will approach DEI.” Meta’s choice to remove DEI initiatives may be pre-empting any future changes in legislation. “It’s clear that there’s a shift on this issue from a policy and legal perspective,” Kaplan continued, “and we anticipate that will happen even more moving forward, and we want to ensure our programs are in a long-term and sustainable position.
Companies like McDonalds, Walmart, Ford Motor Co., John Deere, Lowes, and Toyota reportedly made similar decisions in 2024.
Has DEI Become a “Charged Term”?
Instead of DEI programs, Meta will reportedly be building programs “that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” according to a memo from Meta’s vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale. “The term ‘DEI’ has become charged, in part because some understand it as a practice that suggests preferential treatment by some groups over others.”
Ending Representation Goals
The bottom line is that Meta will no longer have a team focusing on DEI but on accessibility and engagement. It will no longer apply a diverse-slate hiring approach, ensuring that a diverse pool of candidates is considered for every open position.
“[Representation goals] can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it,” Gale wrote. “[The company] ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities.”
Now that the company no longer needs to emphasize hiring women and minorities, Gale wrote that Meta is better prepared “to be focused on serving everyone, and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life.”
In 2022, 6.7% of Meta employees were Hispanic, 4.9% were Black, and 84.1% were White or Asian.
A Broader Initiative Toward “Restoring Free Expression”
As noted, the decision to end DEI programs at Meta followed Mark Zuckerburg’s announcement that Meta would end its fact-checking programs on its platforms, where he stated that the company was “going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
“The thing is,” Kaplan stated, “as American companies, when other governments around the world that don’t have our tradition or our First Amendment, when they see the United States government pressuring US companies to take down content, it is just open season then for those governments to put more pressure [on]. We do think it is a real opportunity to work with the Trump administration and to work on free expression at home.”
For his part, Trump said that Meta’s “presentation was excellent.”
