Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), is joining Meta’s board of directors, he announced in an X post Monday.
“I love social media. And I’m excited to be a small part of the future of AI and emerging technologies,” White tweeted Monday.
White’s addition adds a longtime ally of President-elect Donald Trump to the board of a company that once censored him.
Meta banned Trump from their platforms Facebook and Instagram in 2021, citing “his praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol” on Jan. 6.
The temporary ban expired and Meta reinstated Trump to their platforms in 2023. Then-president of global affairs Nick Clegg, however, cautioned Trump from getting too out of line on their platforms again. “We just do not want — if he is to return to our services — for him to do what he did on January 6, which is to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election, much as he sought to discredit the 2020 election,” Clegg told Axios in 2023.
But Meta replaced Clegg as president of global affairs, announcing Thursday that the company’s most prominent Republican executive, Joel Kaplan, would be taking Clegg’s role.
Both White’s addition and Kaplan’s promotion signal a sea change for Meta and the company’s leader Mark Zuckerberg. The billionaire Facebook founder appears to be increasingly moving away from censorship and left-wing favoritism.
In an August letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook censored both factual COVID-19 information and links to the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election season. Zuckerberg admitted both of these decisions were wrong.
White’s addition helps balance out a board that includes former George W. Bush Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt but few other Republicans. Though White claims to be apolitical, he has been a staunch political ally of his longtime friend Donald Trump, appearing often with Trump at political allies and inviting him to appear at numerous UFC events.
Neither White nor Meta disclosed the nature of his board membership. White alluded to automated intelligence in Meta’s statement announcing his arrival. “I’ve never been interested in joining a board of directors until I got the offer to join Meta’s board. I am a huge believer that social media and AI are the future,” White said.
He joins robotics and AI expert Charlie Songhurst and financial executive John Elkann as the newest members of Meta’s board.
