Disputes of meaning in institutional and journalistic narratives

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Meta/Facebook in 2017 and 2025

Abstract

This article analyzes Facebook/Meta’s institutional positions on diversity, equity, and inclusion, seeking to identify the meanings produced by these discourses and to understand how they are narratively configured and appropriated, contested, and circulated by journalistic narratives focused on business and technology. The objective is to understand how these constructions participate in the production of meaning around diversity policies in corporate and digital environments. The corpus consists of two institutional statements issued by the company and four news reports published in two journalistic outlets, one national (Exame) and one international (Forbes), referring to the years 2017 and 2025. The method adopted is narrative analysis, guided by Paul Ricoeur’s triple mimesis, of a qualitative and hermeneutic nature. The results indicate significant shifts in the corporate plot: diversity, previously narrated as a central strategic value in 2017, comes to occupy a secondary position, while freedom of expression and the reduction of institutional intervention become organizing axes of the company’s positions in 2025. The journalistic narratives reorganize these events, emphasizing criticisms, risks, and expectations, and reinscribe these meanings in the public sphere by shifting the focus from technical rationality to the social, symbolic, and political consequences of the changes. It is concluded that such transformations are not limited to operational adjustments, but are part of a broader movement of narrative reconfiguration, in which the meanings of diversity, corporate responsibility, and the governance of digital space are publicly contested, in a context traversed by political disputes and ideological repositionings on the part of the company itself.