Meta On Friday, the company told employees it plans to end a number of internal programs aimed at increasing the company’s hiring of diverse candidates. It’s the latest dramatic change ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

Janelle Gale, vice president of people at Meta, made the announcement on the company’s Workplace communications forum.

The changes include Meta ending the company’s “Diverse Slate Approach,” which considers qualified candidates from underrepresented groups for its open positions. The company is also ending its diversity supplier program and its equity and inclusion training programs.

Gale also announced the dissolution of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) team and said Meta Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams will take on a new role focused on accessibility and engagement.

Several Meta employees responded to Gale’s post with comments criticizing the new policy.

“If you don’t stand by your principles in difficult times, these aren’t values, they’re hobbies,” one employee posted in a comment that drew reactions from more than 600 colleagues.

The DEI policy change follows a series of sweeping policy reversals by the social media company this month. Last week, Meta replaced global affairs chief Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a veteran of the company with long-standing ties to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new speech policy that included ending the company’s third-party fact-checking program.

Axios was first to report on the DEI changes at the social media company. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Below is Gale’s full internal memo, obtained by CNBC.

Hello everyone,

I wanted to share some changes we’re making to our hiring, development and sourcing practices. Before we get into the details, some important background information needs to be provided:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The United States Supreme Court recently made decisions that signal a shift in how courts approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination based on inherent characteristics should not be tolerated or encouraged. The term “DEI” is also controversial, in part because it is understood by some to be a practice that suggests preferential treatment for some groups over others.

At Meta our principle is to serve everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams with different knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems, and identifying new opportunities, which ultimately helps us achieve our goal of building products that serve everyone. Furthermore, we have always believed that no one should be given or denied opportunities based on protective characteristics, and that has not changed.

Given the changing legal and policy landscape, we are making the following changes:

• When hiring, we will continue to recruit candidates from diverse backgrounds, but will no longer use the Diverse Slate approach. This practice has always been the subject of public debate and is currently being questioned. We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams of world-class people from diverse backgrounds to build products that work for everyone.

• We previously removed representation targets for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can give the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. Although this has never been our practice, we would like to exclude any impression of it.

• We are finalizing our supplier diversity efforts as part of our broader supplier strategy. These efforts focused on sourcing diversely owned companies; Going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium-sized businesses, which drive much of our economy. Opportunities continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those participating in the supplier diversity program.

• Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will develop programs that focus on applying fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for everyone, regardless of background.

• We will no longer have a team focused on DEI. Maxine Williams takes on a new role at Meta focused on accessibility and engagement.

What has remained the same are the principles we have used to guide our human resources practices:

1. We serve everyone. We strive to make our products accessible, useful and universally effective for everyone.
2. We build the best teams with the most talented people. This means that you recruit employees from a range of candidate pools, but never make hiring decisions based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, gender, etc.). We will always evaluate people as individuals.
3. We promote consistency in employment practices to ensure fairness and objectivity for all. We do not grant anyone preferential treatment, additional opportunities or unfair credit based on protected characteristics. We will not discount the effect based on these characteristics.
4. We build connection and community. We support our employee communities, people who use our products, and those in the communities. We continue to operate our Employee Community Groups (MRGs) open to all.

Meta has the privilege of serving billions of people every day. It’s important to us that our products are accessible to everyone and useful in driving economic growth and opportunity around the world. We remain focused on serving everyone and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life.

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