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The night before Thanksgiving, Facebook creator and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had dinner with newly elected President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The top tech entrepreneur has broken bread with the new president because he wants to play an “active role” in shaping tech policy once Trump moves back to the White House in January, according to Meta’s Nick Clegg.
Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, briefed reporters on Monday, admitting that Facebook had been too heavy-handed in moderating pandemic-related content. The social media platform “overdid it a bit,” Clegg said, according to FT. That public acknowledgment is seen as a prelude to Trump and Republicans, who have complained that the social media giant was censoring conservative ideas.
Clegg said Zuckerberg is eager to “play an active role in the debates that any administration must have about maintaining America’s leadership in technology.” That leadership, Clegg said, “is hugely important given all the geostrategic uncertainties around the world, and especially the critical role that AI will play.”
“Mark was grateful for the invitation to dinner with President Trump and the opportunity to meet members of his team from the new administration,” a Meta spokesperson previously told DailyMail.com about the Mar-a-Lago dinner Wednesday. Zuckerberg is also likely looking to get his foot in the door, as Facebook’s main competitor is already at the table.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X, has become one of the president-elect’s closest advisers. Musk was caught spending the Thanksgiving holiday with the Trumps – after weeks of siding with Republicans.
He originally supported Trump after the July 13 assassination attempt on the Republican candidate at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk then spent millions to get Trump re-elected to the White House. Zuckerberg remained neutral during the presidential election.
He irritated liberal workers and surprised some Democratic lawmakers when he wrote a letter in August to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, saying Meta was being pressured by the Biden administration in 2021 to do some Remove COVID-related content ‘including humor and satire.’ “I believe the government pressure was misguided, and I regret that we were not more forthcoming about it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg reiterated what he said he told Meta employees that “we should not compromise our content standards under pressure from any government – and we are prepared to push back if something like this happens again.” Clegg said Monday that Zuckerberg wanted “an area of continued focus” on how Facebook “improves the precision and accuracy with which we enforce our rules.”
“We are acutely aware – as users rightly raised their voices and complained about this – that we sometimes over-enforce, make mistakes and remove or restrict harmless or innocent content,” he said.
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