Mark Zuckerberg is ‘very keen to play an active role’ in Trump’s tech policymaking, Meta exec says

• Mark Zuckerberg and President-elect Donald Trump have had a rocky relationship.
• Still, a Meta exec said Zuckerberg was “keen to play an active role” in tech-policy conversations.
• The exec didn’t say what the two discussed at a dinner but described talks as “fairly high level.”

Elon Musk already has Donald Trump’s ear on policy discussions — and 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 call on Monday, The Verge reported.

Zuckerberg and Trump have sparred before. But they’ve been in contact recently, meeting for dinner last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Clegg declined to share details of their talks but said that “the conversations at this stage are clearly fairly high level.”

Zuckerberg and Trump met on several occasions during Trump’s presidency. Trump has been highly critical of Facebook and Zuckerberg over the years, going so far as to say he’d jail Zuckerberg if reelected.

Facebook suspended Trump’s account in 2021 over his comments during the Capitol riot; Zuckerberg said at the time that “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 Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

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.”

In his call with reporters, Clegg also discussed Meta’s moderation efforts — over 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 still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable,” he said. “Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly.”