President-elect Donald Trump and META CEO Mark Zuckerberg had dinner together on Wednesday night at Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s an important time for the future of American Innovation,” a META spokesperson said in a statement. “Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration.”
However, The New York Times reported that the meeting was “initiated” by Zuckerberg as he seeks to “insulate Meta” over any negative action his company could face from the incoming administraiton.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, confirmed the meeting and said that Zuckerberg “has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of, and a participant in, this change we’re seeing all around America and the world, with this reform movement that Donald Trump is leading.”
“He’s made clear that he wants to support the national renewal of America under President Trump’s leadership,” he added.
The Times noted that the 40-year-old tech entrepreneur has had a strained relationship with Trump ever since Trump entered politics. He did call Trump after he was shot over the summer and referred to Trump’s reaction
Conservatives have repeatedly accused the company of censoring their voices on the company’s platforms, especially Facebook.
Trump wrote in his book “Save America” that Zuckerberg had plotted against him in the 2020 presidential election and had threatened that he could be criminally charged if he did so in 2024.
“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” Trump wrote. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Zuckerberg admitted over summer that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to censor content during 2020.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said in an August letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.”
He said that he made choices under pressure from the Biden administration that in hindsight he would not make again.
He said that the company made a mistake by temporarily demoting a New York Post story during the 2020 election about Hunter Biden’s laptop after officials falsely suggested that it was part of a “Russian disinformation operation.”
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he said. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again – for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S while waiting for fact-checkers.”
Zuckerberg said that he also wanted to be politically neutral moving forward and that he made a mistake by hiring employees who tried to steer him toward the political Left.
“The political environment, I think I didn’t have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” he said in an interview with The New York Times the following month.
“I think it’s going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand is back to the place that it could have been, if I hadn’t messed up in the first place,” he added.
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