Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wants to play an “active role” in shaping tech regulations under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, the social media giant’s top policy executive said
Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, also admitted that the Facebook and Instagram parent “overdid it a bit” while moderating pandemic-related content.
Zuckerberg is aiming to have “an active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere,” Clegg said during a Monday press briefing, according to The Financial Times.
US leadership on tech issues “is tremendously important given all the geostrategic uncertainties around the world, and particularly the pivotal role that AI will play,” Clegg added.
The mea culpa by Clegg is the latest sign that Meta wants to cozy up to Trump – who has previously called Facebook “an enemy of the people” and slammed its billionaire founder for censoring conservative viewpoints.
Last week, Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after he reportedly requested a meeting with the president-elect to discuss “the incoming administration.” Afterward, Meta said that Zuckerberg was “grateful for the invitation.”
Zuckerberg wants Meta’s efforts “to improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules” to be “an area of ongoing focus” at the company, according to Clegg.
“We’re acutely aware — because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained about this — that we sometimes over enforce, we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content,” Clegg said.
Trump has said he opposed the idea of banning China-owned TikTok in part because it would “make Facebook bigger.”
Trump and his allies had targeted Meta as a recently as July, accusing the company of suppressing information about the attempted assassination of the then-presidential candidate at a July 13 rally.
In August, Zuckerberg shocked the tech industry by admitting that the Biden administration had pressured Facebook to censor content related to COVID-19 in 2021 – including lighthearted memes and satirical posts.
Zuckerberg made the admission in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
The Facebook founder has also acknowledged that the company was wrong to censor The Post’s exclusive reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the past.
The overtures have occurred even as Meta is locked in a fierce competition with the likes of Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI to develop advanced artificial intelligence tools. Unlike its rivals, Meta supports an “open source” approach to AI.
Another key figure jockeying for influence on AI policy is X owner Elon Musk, who has emerged as a key adviser to Trump and has frequently clashed with Zuckerberg over the years.