Meta warned that employees who leak information could be fired after CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s comments during an internal staff meeting were passed on to multiple media outlets.
On Thursday, during a gathering of over 70,000 Meta staff for the company’s first all-hands meeting of 2025, Mark Zuckerberg grumbled that past comments he had made during insider company discussions had been leaked.
As he touched on sensitive topics engulfing his company, including overhauling Meta’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, ending its “fact-checking” program, and working with President Donald Trump’s administration, Zuckerberg said because of leaks, he would talk about “main themes” but would avoid delving into topics that are “value-destroying.”
“We try to be really open and then everything I say leaks,” he told staff. “It sucks.”
“We are going to try to address all the main themes and topics, but for where we are now, there are just a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about,” he continued. “So I’m just not going to talk about those.”
The scene got messier when Zuckerberg’s complaints about leaking were spilled to multiple media outlets after the staff meeting, which led to Meta chief information security officer Guy Rosen issuing an internal company memo warning employees further leaks could result in termination.
“We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Rosen wrote in the memo. “When information is stolen or leaked, there are repercussions beyond the immediate security impact. Our teams become demoralized and we all waste time that is better spent working on our products and toward our goals and mission.”
“We recently terminated relationships with employees who leaked confidential company information inappropriately and exfiltrated sensitive documents,” he continued.
That internal memo was also leaked to the media.
During the Thursday all-staff meeting, Zuckerberg said that 2025 would be “a big year” for the company, revealing that Meta has plans to partner with the U.S. government.
“I want to be clear, after the last several years, we now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government. We’re going to take that,” Zuckerberg said.“I think it’s the right thing to do because there are several areas, even if we don’t agree on everything, where we have a common cause for things that are going to make it so that we can serve our community better, and we can advance the interests of our country together.”
The news comes as a reset of sorts for Meta.
Zuckerberg sparred with Trump during his first term in office over the president’s concerns that Meta was discriminating against conservative viewpoints and suppressing free speech. The feud erupted after Meta suspended Trump’s Instagram and Facebook accounts in 2021, claiming that he had “encouraged” and “praised” the people who marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Now, the two men appear to be on much friendlier terms.
On Wednesday, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump against the company for suspending his social media accounts. Meta also axed its controversial fact-checking program just before Trump took office earlier this month, citing problems with “political bias.” During an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan days later, Zuckerberg accused the Biden administration of placing intense pressure on his company to censor information, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Commenting on the move away from what critics have described as censorship, Zuckerberg said on Thursday: “There were a bunch of policies that we implemented over time that sort of narrowed what people could say on our services. Frankly, we were just way out of the mainstream. When we say that someone can say something on our services, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we agree with that thing. It just means that we want to be a platform where people can discuss things.”
The same day it terminated fact-checkers, Meta killed its DEI initiatives, which had faced fierce criticism from Republicans.
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Zuckerberg also touched on the DEI policy change this week, saying that “you can’t do things that advantage specific groups, even if you’re trying to make up for other things.”
“The way to think about this is we’re in the middle of a pretty rapidly changing policy and regulatory landscape that increasingly views any policy that might advantage any one group of people over another as something that is unlawful, and because of that, we need to adjust, or else we’ll just be out of alignment with what the law is saying,” Zuckerberg said, citing the 2023 decision from the Supreme Court striking down race-based affirmative action in higher education, a decision that held legal consequences for corporations hiring based on race.