Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, who have previously engaged in bitter public feuds, are now warming to each other as Zuckerberg seeks to influence tech policy in the incoming administration.
The Meta CEO dined at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida last week, talking technology and demonstrating the company’s camera-equipped sunglasses, Fox News reported.
“Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we’re seeing all around America,” Stephen Miller, a top Trump deputy, told Fox.
Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, agreed with Miller. Clegg said in a recent press call that Zuckerberg wanted to play an “active role” in the administration’s tech policy decisions and wanted to participate in “the debate that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere,” particularly on artificial intelligence. Meta declined to provide further comment.
The weeks since the election have seen something of a give-and-take developing between Trump and Zuckerberg, who previously banned the president-elect from Instagram and Facebook for using the platforms to incite political violence on 6 January 2021. In a move that appears in deference to Trump – who has long accused Meta of censoring conservative views – the company now says its content moderation has at times been too heavy-handed.
Clegg said hindsight showed that Meta “overdid it a bit” in removing content during the Covid-19 pandemic, which Zuckerberg recently blamed on pressure from the Biden administration.
“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable,” Clegg said during the press call. “Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly.”
Meta and Zuckerberg personally have shown other signs of softening towards Trump. The company lifted its ban on Trump ahead of the election, and Zuckerberg called the president-elect a “badass” for defiantly pumping a fist after being shot in July.
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Zuckerberg was also among the tech leaders quick to publicly congratulate Trump following the November election – and seemed to anticipate years of collaboration ahead.
“We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” he said in a 6 November post on Threads. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
