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Mark Zuckerberg and President-elect Donald Trump have had a rocky relationship at times.
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Still, Zuckerberg is “keen to play an active role” in Trump’s conversations on tech policymaking, a Meta exec told reporters.
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Meta’s Nick Clegg didn’t say what the pair discussed at a recent dinner but said their talks were “fairly high level.”
Elon Musk already has Donald Trump’s ear on policy discussions — it sounds like Mark Zuckerberg wants in on that too.
“Mark is very keen to play an active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere” and “particularly the pivotal role that AI will play,” Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, told journalists during a Monday call, The Verge reported.
Zuckerberg and Trump have sparred before. However, the Meta CEO and the president-elect have been in contact recently, meeting for dinner last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Clegg declined to share details of their talk but said that “the conversations at this stage are clearly fairly high level.”
He added that Zuckerberg wants to be involved in Trump’s conversations about tech policymaking. The two met on multiple occasions during Trump’s presidency.
Trump, who has been highly critical of Facebook and Zuckerberg over the years, has gone as far as to say he’d jail Zuckerberg if re-elected. Facebook suspended Trump’s account in 2020 over his comments during the January 6 capitol riot, with Zuckerberg saying at the time “the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.” Two years later, the company reinstated his accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
Unlike Musk, Zuckerberg didn’t endorse a presidential candidate this year. In an interview, the Meta CEO said Trump’s reaction to being shot at a Pennsylvania rally this summer was “badass.”
Clegg also discussed Meta’s moderation efforts in his call with reporters this week — a topic in which the social media company has faced criticism from both sides of the aisle — saying the company “overdid it a bit” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are too high, which gets in the way of the free expression we set out to enable,” he said. “Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly.”
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