Meta's 2025 is off to a 'frenzied start.' Don't expect it to slow down.


Meta

Sat, February 1, 2025 at 4:01 AM EST Meta kicked off 2025 with big changes following a big year for the company. In the first weeks of January, it overhauled its content moderation system, nixed DEI programs, and announced layoffs. The "rather frenzied start" to the new year sets up an apparent "year of intensity," one analyst told BI. Coming off of a banner year in 2024, Meta is hitting the ground running in 2025. With a new president in the White House and the AI arms race in full swing amid DeepSeek mania, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has kept busy. Referring to Meta's January as "a rather frenzied start," Forrester VP and research director Mike Proulx said that the company's past "year of efficiency" was being "trumped in 2025 with an apparent year of 'intensity.'" The company made several big announcements in the first week of the new year ahead of Trump's inauguration, and in audio from Meta's all-hands meeting this week obtained by Business Insider, Zuckerberg told employees to "buckle up." "Everyone always says that every year is a big year, right?" Zuckerberg said. "When I look at the kind of long-term trajectory for the stuff that we're doing this year, I think by the end of this year we're going to have a much clearer sense of the trajectory of a lot of the long-term things that we're doing, whether that's AI or glasses, or a number of areas around the future of social media, a number of key partnerships that we're working on," the Meta CEO said. "This year feels a little more like a sprint to me," he added. New year, new policies that will impact your News Feed If 2025 represents a sprint for Meta, the first leg of the race saw some of its biggest changes in years. The most impactful for Meta's billions of users was announced on January 7, when Zuckerberg messaged that Meta's content moderation policy would be overhauled. In a controversial decision, Meta said that it would sunset its third-party fact-checking in favor of community notes, similar to that of Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter. Zuckerberg said Wednesday he thinks a community notes model "is just going to be more effective."