Meta head of global affairs Nick Clegg revealed in a press briefing that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is eager to play an “active role” in shaping tech policy for President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. In March Trump described Facebook as “the enemy of the people” and labeled its CEO “Zuckerschmuck.”
The New York Post reports that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is making moves to establish a closer relationship with the incoming Trump administration. Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, recently stated that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is keen on having “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.”
This revelation comes on the heels of Zuckerberg’s recent dinner with President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where the billionaire reportedly requested a meeting to discuss “the incoming administration.” Meta later said that Zuckerberg was “grateful for the invitation.”
Clegg also acknowledged that Meta has been overzealous in its content moderation efforts, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re acutely aware — because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained about this — that we sometimes overenforce, we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content,” he admitted.
Meta’s efforts to improve the precision and accuracy of its content moderation will be “an area of ongoing focus” for the company, according to Clegg. This admission comes after Zuckerberg shocked the tech industry in August by revealing that the Biden administration had pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content in 2021, including lighthearted memes and satirical posts.
As Breitbart News previously reported:
The Wall Street Journal reports that in a letter addressed to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that senior Biden administration officials, including those from the White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor certain Covid-19 related content, including humor and satire, in 2021. Zuckerberg revealed that the officials expressed frustration when Facebook’s teams did not agree to censor the content as requested, highlighting the tension between the social media giant and the government over content moderation.
“I believe that the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly 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.”
Zuckerberg’s attempts to establish a rapport with the Trump administration come as a surprise, given the president-elect’s previous criticism of Facebook, calling it “an enemy of the people” and slamming its founder, who he labeled as “Zuckerschmuck,” for censoring conservative viewpoints. Trump and his allies had targeted Meta as recently as July, accusing the company of suppressing information about an attempted assassination of the Republican presidential nominee at a rally.
Another key figure vying for influence on AI policy is X owner Elon Musk, who has emerged as a key adviser to Trump and has often clashed with Zuckerberg over the years. Trump recently stated that he opposed the idea of banning China-owned TikTok, in part because it would “make Facebook bigger.”
In September, Breitbart News reported that Zuckerberg’s AI praised Kamala Harris while calling Trump “crude and lazy.”
Read more at the New York Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
