Meta Appoints New Board Members, Including UFC Chief Dana White

With Donald Trump returning to the White House for a second term, it appears that this will have some impact on how Meta approaches certain aspects of its business and planning going forward.

On that line, today, Meta has announced three new board members, the executive director of Exor John Elkann, investor Charlie Songhurst and UFC boss Dana White.

The most notable inclusion here is White, who strongly supported Donald Trump and even spoke at the Republican National Convention last year. White too supported Trump’s 2020 campaignand spoke on Trump’s behalf at some of his rallies.

Including such a strong Trump ally on the Meta board could help ease tensions with the incoming president, who at one point had threatened Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with prison if he were to take over again, because of the company’s perceived political bias. Trump was referring specifically to Meta’s decision to suspend his Facebook and IG accounts back in 2021, after riots at the Capitol, while key Trump ally Elon Musk was also there a sharp critic of Zuckerberg and his politically motivated actions.

Since Trump’s re-election, however, Meta has been taking steps to better align it with the rest of the Trump administration, including replacing head of public affairs Nick Cleggwho was the man who actually is called for the suspension of Trump’s accountsand replace him with Republican Joel Kaplan and veteran Meta who is has long urged the Met to take a more liberal approach to political speech in its apps.

Meta has also restructured its public policy team to drum up more Republican votes, while Zuckerberg has too met with Trump in person to iron out their differences.

And now White has also been appointed to what could be an important advisory position.

The most significant effect this could have, from a general user perspective, is that Meta could rethink its anti-political stance and remove restrictions on “political” speech.

Target announced that it took steps 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 it if they want.

This has proven particularly problematic on Threads, its replica of the Twitter app, where real-time updates are a key focus and limiting discussion to certain areas likely hurts overall engagement. But on Facebook and Instagram, Meta found the political discussion to be more trouble than it was worth, causing more anxiety and therefore less time spent on her apps, while also bringing more scrutiny to the company for its perceived bias or interference.

But now, with more influential voices having a say in its approach, Meta may change its tune and try to relax those restrictions again, or at least make political content more accessible to users.

And Meta can still have enormous political influence.

WITH more than 3 billion users in its family of applicationsthe audience reach is more than 10 times that of X, which undoubtedly played a key role in the last election.

As such, and given these new ties to the Trump administration, it appears that Meta will take a new approach to such a move forward, which could see the company shift to a more neutral approach to political discourse than it has been adopted during previous Trump administrations.

Is that a good thing?

Well, it depends on how you look at it and what position the Meta will end up being put in to make such calls.

Facebook has repeatedly sanctioned Trump during his first term for making divisive, dangerous comments, while various Trump posts have also been flagged, much to Trump’s own ire.

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

This could mean that Meta will end up with fewer moderator calls in any event, so essentially adding more pro-Trump voices to its meetings could be more symbolic than anything else.

But it also depends on how Trump chooses to connect and whether the Meta keeps its distance from him for the next four years. Inevitably, there will be times when Trump will make claims that will raise concerns, and they will be in situations where it could become a topic of discussion, and the influence of people like Dana White could come into play.

But right now it seems more like smart business moves than anything else, working to placate Trump into a better working relationship.

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