Meta are willing to be downright evil if it's profitable. Just ask the Rohingya. They might have hired enough DEI people that there was a cadre of pro-DEI thought within the company, but at a higher level that was only ever preemption against regulatory action, and evidently they weren't ever allowed to take root.

> This is just them running with their tails between their legs before the new admin takes over.

They're not running away from this, they're running towards the new admin, mouths wide open to receive. This admin promises to be amazing for dead-eyed big tech fuckery and they want in. And it's a win-win for them as they can also save the expensive DEI and fact-checking cost center departments while they're at it.

I think this is the norm for any topic that is politicized. You could have ChatGPT or some other LLM write the memo and it wouldn't be much better or worse.

Suppose you made a bad policy decision and want to roll it back. How do you do that? Anything you do is going to piss someone off. I think they're trying to do it in a plausibly reasonable way without shitting on everyone who worked on it for a couple years.

Goes way, way back—I remember announcements nearly 20 years ago where they were basically removing/setting bad defaults on what primitive privacy controls they had at the time, but calling it making things "more social."