When asked in recent interviews, “What has been your greatest career achievement to date?” I haven’t hesitated to say I created and launched Facebook’s Supplier Diversity Program. With that program, Facebook (it wasn’t Meta yet) committed to integrating diversity into the fabric of the company, not just through improving employee representation, but also by strategically engaging demographics with large spending power to make better products and reflect our user base.
Zuckerberg, a guest of President Trump’s inauguration, just deposited Meta’s Supplier Diversity Program in the “circular file” because it no longer serves him.
Now, I have to change my answer, thanks to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a guest of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, who just deposited Meta’s Supplier Diversity Program in the “circular file” because it no longer serves him or, in this case, doesn’t please the incoming administration.
I’m not surprised Zuckerberg is getting rid of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiative I helped create, or that he’s removing fact-checking and letting people from marginalized communities be subjected to more harassment. I’m only surprised that it took him so long. Sheryl Sandberg, who served as Facebook’s chief operating officer between 2008 and 2022, was the company’s champion of content moderation, sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion. When she left in 2022, I started a countdown clock in my head for the inevitable. With Sandberg gone, the buffer was removed. So what might strike outsiders as a change in ethos for the company is really just Zuckerberg showing us who he really is.
The business case for diversity was only valid as long as Sandberg was around to enforce it. Now that it’s not politically in vogue, Zuckerberg is abandoning the business use case for diversity and fact-checking, and he’s picked for his VP of global policy Joel Kaplan (who sat behind Brett Kavanaugh, his friend from the George W. Bush White House, at his Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court). All are clear signs of Zuckerberg’s conservative philosophy.
During the so-called “racial reckoning” of the summer of 2020, which we now can see was a huge demonstration of corporate pandering, companies were bending over backward to demonstrate how inclusive and accommodating they could be. Conglomerate after conglomerate issued saccharine statements about supporting their diverse (read: Black) employees after the murder of George Floyd, while Covid disproportionately ravaged Black and brown communities. Hundreds of millions of dollars were pledged to civic and civil rights organizations to do business with Black companies and to fund training programs and scholarships to ease that pesky and ever-present “pipeline problem.”
In June 2020, Facebook pledged a $1.1 billion “investment in Black and diverse suppliers and communities in the U.S.” In 2022, Meta reported: “In 2021, we exceeded our diverse supplier commitment, spending $1.26 billion with US certified diverse suppliers and more than $306 million with Black-owned businesses in the US.” Sandberg left the company as COO the year that report was made, and gone with her was the desire to protect DEI initiatives.
Zuckerberg, who’s now evangelizing on the virtues of “masculine energy” in companies, has reportedly blamed Sandberg for the existence of the company’s diversity initiatives and said she was the reason why he couldn’t disband them.
Meta abandoning all companywide DEI programs would mean abandoning efforts to recruit at schools typically outside of their funnel — the Grace Hopper Conference, the AfroTech Conference, historically Black colleges and universities and state schools — so it’s clear diversity is not an asset to them. Zuckerberg must have seen Elon Musk of X questioning the talent and intellect of HBCU students; by eliminating DEI programs, he’s essentially doing the same.
I spent nights, weekends, and even part of my maternity leave, creating the supplier diversity program. And now it’s defunct.
This is personal for me. From October 2014 to October 2016, I spent nights, weekends and even part of my maternity leave, creating the supplier diversity program. And now it’s defunct. The company went from hosting what’s called the Billion Dollar Roundtable with Google three months ago to disbanding the whole program the next quarter, giving me the worst case of whiplash known to man.
When political tides change, lobbyists and global affairs teams seek to improve their relationships with the new people in power. That playbook is nothing new. But surely, Zuckerberg could make inroads with the new administration without co-hosting a black-tie gala or sitting on the dais during Trump’s inauguration. Making nice with a new administration definitely doesn’t require a visit to Mar-A-Lago or sharing his planned policy changes with Trump adviser Stephen Miller before announcing them.
With the end of fact-checking and Meta abandoning diversity, marginalized people are not only unsafe on these platforms, but hate speech is damn near encouraged. If that’s the kind of products and policies being created, I have no faith that our voices will be heard concerning the disparate impact on product changes. Because to get rid of DEI initiatives is to make sure we’re no longer at the table. Even for those still at Meta, their voice will carry less weight as soon as they advocate for those viewpoints, use cases and outcomes.
The only thing people can do at this point is vote with their engagement. I’m encouraging people I know to delete their accounts or let them sit dormant. We need to move on from platforms that give free rein to people foaming at the mouth to insult and harm us for their pleasure and that create products that don’t consider their disparate impact on us or our communities. All that as they sell our data.
Are these fundamental changes, or are they just for show? Some may be holding out hope that the DEI work Meta says it’s abandoning will still be done, just under a different name, but I don’t believe that.
I believe this is Zuckerberg showing us who he really is.
Bärí A. Williams
Bärí A. Williams is the author of "Seen Yet Unseen: A Black Woman Crashes the Tech Fraternity." She previously served as head of business operations, North America, for StubHub and lead counsel for Meta (then Facebook), where she created its now defunct Supplier Diversity program.