(LifeSiteNews) — Dana White, president of the American mixed martial arts promotion company Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), announced on Monday that he will be joining the board of directors of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, upon invitation.
“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,” said White, a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, in a statement shared to X.
I love social media. And I’m excited to be a small part of the future of AI and emerging technologies. @Meta pic.twitter.com/Amh5W728og
— danawhite (@danawhite) January 6, 2025
In his own statement, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced that Italian investment executive John Elkann, and technology investor Charlie Songhurst would also be joining Meta’s board of directors, and he praised White for building UFC into “one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world.”
White’s addition to Meta’s board comes as Zuckerberg promises to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on Meta’s platforms, suggesting that past extreme censorship stems from pressure from the Biden administration and legacy media.
“The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” noted Zuckerberg, who met with president-elect Donald Trump shortly after his decisive election victory.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” he said.
Facebook has long faced criticism for its harsh censorship regime, including for deplatforming conservative users and censoring speech critical of COVID tyranny and the LGBT agenda, in addition to facilitating child sex trafficking. In fact, Meta suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram in 2021, citing “his praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol” on January 6.
While Meta reinstated Trump’s accounts in 2023, then-president of global affairs Nick Clegg warned, “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.
Meta announced Thursday that Republican Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy since 2011 and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for George W. Bush, will be replacing Clegg.
White first endorsed Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where he told how Trump allowed the UFC to host its first event under Zuffa ownership at the Trump Taj Mahal when other venues turned down the UFC. “No arenas wanted us. This guy reached out, and he’s always been a friend to me,” White said at the time.
While White endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential election and remains at least a personal supporter of the man, he declared in November to The New Yorker in a strongly-worded statement that he is done with politics.