The night before Thanksgiving, Facebook creator and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dined with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
The top tech entrepreneur broke bread with the incoming president because he wants to play an ‘active role’ in shaping tech policy once Trump moves back into the White House come January, according to Meta’s Nick Clegg.
Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, briefed reporters on Monday, and conceded that Facebook had been too heavy-handed when moderating pandemic-related content.
The social media platform ‘overdid it a bit’ Clegg said, according to FT.
That public admission is seen as an overture to Trump and Republicans, who have complained that the social media giant censored conservative ideas.
Clegg said that Zuckerberg is keen to play ‘an active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere.’
That leadership, Clegg offered, ‘is tremendously important given all the geostrategic uncertainties around the world, and particularly the pivotal role that AI will play.’
‘Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team from the incoming Administration,’ a spokesperson for Meta previously told DailyMail.com about Wednesday’s Mar-a-Lago dinner.
The night before Thanksgiving, President-elect Donald Trump (left) hosted Facebook creator and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (right) for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida
Mark Zuckerberg paid a visit to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday night. Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg said the meeting happened because Zuckerberg wants to play an ‘active role’ in shaping tech policy
Zuckerberg also likely wants to get his foot in the door since Facebook’s chief competitor already has a seat at the table.
Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X, has become one of the president-elect’s closest advisers.
Musk was captured spending the Thanksgiving holiday with the Trumps – after being by the Republican’s side for weeks.
He originally endorsed Trump on the heels of the July 13 assassination attempt on the Republican nominee at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally.
Musk then spent millions trying to get Trump reelected to the White House.
Zuckerberg stayed neutral in the presidential election.
He irritated liberal employees and surprised some Democratic lawmakers when he penned a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, in August and said that Meta was pressured by the Biden administration in 2021 to take some COVID-related content down ‘including humor and satire.’
‘I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,’ Zuckerberg wrote. ‘I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.’
Zuckerberg reiterated what he said he had told Meta employees that ‘we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.’
Clegg said Monday that Zuckerberg wanted ‘an area of ongoing focus’ to be how Facebook ‘improve[s] the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules.’
‘We’re acutely aware – because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained about this – that we sometimes over enforce, we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content,’ he said.
