As Meta flees politics, races turn to new tricks
Days after President Donald Trump clinched a surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg touted his company’s influence in politics. The CEO proclaimed he was “proud” Facebook had given many “a voice in this election.”
“We helped millions of people connect with candidates so they could hear from them directly and be better informed,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.
Now, on the eve of a matchup between Trump and President Biden, Meta is changing course.
After years of pitching its suite of social media apps as the lifeblood of campaigns, Meta is breaking up with politics. The company has decreased the visibility of politics-focused posts and accounts on Facebook and Instagram as well as imposed new rules on political advertisers, kneecapping the targeting system long used by politicians to reach potential voters.
Waves of layoffs have eviscerated the team responsible for coordinating with politicians and campaigns, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private personnel matters. This includes foreign-based workers and U.S. employees who promoted the company’s products to politicians and fielded questions from campaigns about their services.
An advertising sales team, which once embedded with the Trump team during the 2016 election, is now responsible for many of their previous responsibilities, the people said.
Meta’s shift away from current events is forcing campaigns to upend their digital outreach in a move that could transform the 2024 election. Comparing March 2020 to March 2024, both the Biden and Trump campaigns saw 60 percent declines in their average engagement per Facebook post, a Washington Post review found, with double-digit declines on Instagram.
The Trump team has cast Meta’s moves as an effort to tip the scales in favor of Biden. The Biden campaign, meanwhile, had already begun to shift its online focus, rolling out a cadre of influencers and volunteers to spread their messages across private spaces on social networks.
Still, in tight races across the country, neither Democrats nor Republicans can afford to ignore Facebook — the world’s largest social media network. Political ad spending on social media is expected to almost double from $324 million in 2020 to $605 million in 2024, according to estimates from digital analytics firm EMARKETER.
“There’s no other platform that reaches as many voters at that scale,” said Eric Wilson, a managing partner at Republican campaign tech incubator Startup Caucus. “So campaigns would be foolish to walk away from that.”
Meta spokesperson Dani Lever argued that the changes are a response to user feedback. “These changes are intended to impact what people see because that is what they told us they wanted — to see less political content and have more controls,” she said. “This approach builds on years of work and is being applied to everyone.”
More than a decade ago, Silicon Valley courted the political world.
Zuckerberg moderated a 2011 town hall with President Barack Obama, broadcast live on Facebook. Presidential debates in the 2016 campaign streamed on Facebook Live. Advertising employees kept politicians and campaigns up to date on the company’s latest tools, even embedding with the Trump team in 2016.
But following widespread outrage over attempts by Russian operatives to infiltrate social media to influence the 2016 presidential race, Meta — then known as Facebook — began rejiggering its strategy. The company scrapped commissions for its political ads sales reps and created a new site to promote its tools for politicians across the political spectrum.
The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was partially organized on Facebook, sped this retreat. Soon after the siege, the company announced it would reduce the amount of political content appearing in users’ news feeds.
“People don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Zuckerberg told investors three weeks after the attack.