Meta Appoints New Board Members, Including UFC Chief Dana White

With Donald Trump returning to the White House for a second term, it certainly seems like that’s going to have some impact on how Meta approaches certain aspects of its business and planning moving forward.

Along that line, today, Meta has announced three new board members, in Exor CEO John Elkann, investor Charlie Songhurst, and UFC chief Dana White.

The most notable inclusion here is White, who’s been a strong supporter of Donald Trump, and even spoke at the Republican National Convention last year. White also supported Trump’s 2020 campaign, and has spoken on Trump’s behalf at some of his rallies.

The inclusion of such a strong Trump ally on the Meta board could help to ease tensions with the incoming President, who, at one stage, had threatened to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg if he were to regain power, due to the company’s perceived political bias. Trump was specifically referring to Meta’s decision to suspend his Facebook and IG accounts back in 2021, following the Capitol riots, while key Trump ally Elon Musk has also been a strong critic of Zuckerberg and his politically-motivated actions.    

Since Trump’s re-election, however, Meta has been making moves to better align it with a second Trump administration, including replacing public affairs leader Nick Clegg, who was the man who actually made the call on suspending Trump’s accounts, and replacing him with Republican Joel Kaplan, and Meta veteran who’s long pushed for Meta to take a more hands-off approach to political speech in its apps.

Meta has also restructured its public policy team to elevate more Republican voices, while Zuckerberg has also personally met with Trump to smooth over their differences.

And it’s now also appointed White to what may be an important advisory position.

The most significant impact that this could have, from a general user perspective, is that it could see Meta reconsidering its anti-politics stance, and removing restrictions on “political” speech.

Meta announced that it was making moves to limit the reach of political content in its apps early last year, and has since sought to make political material opt-in, giving users the chance to avoid such if they prefer.

That’s proven particularly problematic on Threads, its Twitter replica app, in which real-time updates are a key focus, and limiting discussion in certain areas is likely hurting overall engagement. But on Facebook and Instagram, Meta deemed that political discussion was more trouble than it was worth, in sparking more angst, and thus, less time spent in its apps, while also bringing more scrutiny on the company for its perceived bias or interferences.

But now, with more influential voices having a say in its approach, Meta could well change its tune, and look to ease those limits once again, or at least, make political content more accessible to users.

And Meta can still have huge political influence.

With over 3 billion users across its family of apps, its audience reach is more than 10x that of X, which arguably played a key role in the most recent election.

As such, and given these new ties to the Trump administration, it seems that Meta will be taking a new approach to such moving forward, which could see the company shift to a more hands-off approach around political discourse than it adopted during the previous Trump administration.

Is that a good thing?

Well, it depends on how you view it, and what position Meta ends up being put in to make such calls.

Trump was repeatedly sanctioned by Facebook during his first term for making divisive, dangerous comments, while various Trump posts were also tagged with warning flags, to the ire of Trump himself.

The repeated censorship of his posts is one of the main factors that led to Trump creating his own social network, and that’ll be a key difference this time around, in that Trump is now more aligned to Truth Social, as opposed to how he relied on Facebook and Twitter to reach an audience back in 2016.

That could mean that Meta ends up having fewer moderation calls to make either way, so in essence, the addition of more pro-Trump voices in its meetings could be more symbolic than anything else.

But it also depends on how Trump chooses to connect, and whether Meta looks to maintain its distance from him over the next four years. There’ll inevitably be times where Trump will make claims that are going to spark concern, and it’ll be in those situations where this could become an issue of debate, and the influence of people like Dana White may come into play.

But right now, it seems more like savvy business moves than anything else, in working to appease Trump to establish a better working relationship.

And given Zuckerberg’s noted love for UFC, he likely already has a relationship with White, which could also make this a beneficial relationship for the business.