Once a Trump critic, Mark Zuckerberg pivots toward the president
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- Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and President Trump have been circling each other for a decade. After challenging and criticizing the president on issues, Zuckerberg in recent months has done a dramatic about face to align himself with Trump.
- Zuckerberg and other tech leaders have gone out of their way to position themselves in the president’s good graces, knowing he could help or hinder them in the race to develop artificial intelligence technologies.
- The changes come as Meta is surging financially.
Before Donald Trump kicked off his second term as president, Meta Platforms Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg took another big swing at hitting reset.
In a nearly three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan, a hugely popular podcaster and brash Trump supporter, Zuckerberg talked about the social media giant’s decision to stop using fact-checkers to combat misinformation. Instead, users would be left to keep one another in check.
Zuckerberg slammed the media and the outgoing administration, saying Biden officials would routinely yell at the social network’s workers during the pandemic to pull down what the government viewed as misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
Rogan has millions of listeners, but Zuckerberg’s message of it being a new day at Meta had already reached the person he perhaps cared about most. A few days before the podcast aired, Trump commented that he was pleased with the changes at Meta. The company, he said, had “come a long way.”
A long way, indeed.
The podcast appearance was just the latest twist in a jarring exercise in corporate re-branding by one of the tech industry’s most influential figures. It’s a metamorphosis that has accelerated in recent months as Zuckerberg, who launched the fact checking program after Trump’s first election victory and challenged him on controversial issues such as immigration, found himself confronted with a new political reality.
Tech leaders who once shunned Trump are now meeting with him, touting the opportunities they see in his next term, and bankrolling his inauguration.
Meta has promoted Republican Joel Kaplan to lead global policy, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, made content moderation changes and rolled back its diversity equity and inclusion initiatives. Dana White, a close ally of Trump, and chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, has joined Meta’s board.
Zuckerberg isn’t the only tech leader trying to appease Trump as other companies race against Meta to lead the development of artificial intelligence technologies that could redefine media and other industries. Knowing Trump could help or hinder their efforts, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, who spent more than $200 million supporting Trump’s reelection campaign, also have gone out of their way to position themselves in the president’s good graces.
“When it’s both a decisive win and you’re seeing somebody like Elon having such influence and being in the room, if I’m Mark, I want to sure as hell make sure I’m at the table,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a technology consulting firm and former longtime public policy director at Facebook.
The high-stakes jockeying became even more pronounced after Chinese tech startup DeepSeek launched an AI assistant that the company claimed was developed at a lower cost than its U.S. rivals.
Zuckerberg said he expects Meta AI — an assistant that can answer questions and generate images — to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025. The social media giant is planning to invest up to $65 billion in capital expenditures, grow its AI teams and build a massive data center, he said in a Facebook post.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. On the Rogan podcast and elsewhere, Zuckerberg has said the changes to Meta’s fact checking policies were made to promote free expression by users and reduce content moderation errors. The company declined to comment further.
Wooing the divisive Trump is not without some risk. Some advertisers might balk at the possibility of having their brands appear alongside false or offensive content or doing business with a company perceived as being dismissive of accuracy and online safety.
But with more than 3 billion people using one of its apps daily, any hit to the social media giant’s advertising business will likely be negligible, analysts say.
The assembly of billionaires at Trump’s inauguration was a display of wealth and power unlike any before. The display was all the more remarkable given how recently many in tech were politically naive or apathetic.
“They’re willing to take some of these risks with its core business because they’re banking on the fact that Facebook and Instagram are such essential platforms to advertisers,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer who covers social media.
Trump and Zuckerberg have been circling each other for years.
In 2016, before Trump’s first presidential term, Zuckerberg made a thinly veiled jab at Trump, who called for a wall to be built between the U.S. Mexico border.
“I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others,” he said at Facebook’s developer conference that year.
Then Trump won the presidency, surprising tech leaders who had backed his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. In an attempt to thaw frosty relations with the politician, Facebook‘s then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Musk, Bezos, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and other high-profile executives attended a highly publicized meeting in Trump tower after his victory.
The detente didn’t last long, as Trump tried to ban travelers from predominantly Muslim countries and launched a crackdown on immigrants in the country illegally. Zuckerberg, who co-founded a political action group focused on immigration called Fwd.us, took to social media in 2017 to share his concerns, stating that “millions of undocumented folks who don’t pose a threat will live in fear of deportation.”
That year, Zuckerberg also toured the United States, sparking rumors that he wanted to run for president.
Facebook, under pressure to do more to combat lies online but insistent it not be the “arbiters of truth,” launched its fact-checking program in 2016. As Facebook tried to limit the spread of misinformation, Trump repeatedly accused social media of “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.”
Tensions flared anew after Facebook, YouTube and Twitter suspended the Republican from their platforms in 2021 because of concerns Trump’s remarks would spark more violence after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world,” Zuckerberg said in a post.
That year, Zuckerberg also registered as a Democrat after previously not specifying a party preference, according to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. The tech mogul once described himself as “pro-knowledge economy” and has donated to both Republicans and Democrats, data from OpenSecrets show.
After he got booted from Facebook, Trump then sued the social networks and created his own social network Truth Social where he referred to Zuckerberg, a billionaire many times over, as “Zuckerbucks” and accused the business leader of interfering in elections.
Elon Musk’s ties to the Trump administration pose potential conflicts of interest for his various businesses that have extensive contracts with the federal government.
In his 2024 book “Save America,” Trump said Zuckerberg, “will spend the rest of his life in prison” if he does “anything illegal” to influence the 2024 presidential election.
An initial sign of Meta’s upcoming course correction came when Trump was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt during a campaign speech. Zuckerberg told Bloomberg in July that seeing Trump defiantly pump his fist in the air as blood trickled down his face was “badass” and “as an American, it’s hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight.”
Zuckerberg didn’t endorse Biden or Trump for president.
After Trump’s win, the 40-year-old billionaire announced in a January video that Meta would end its third-party fact checking program with publishers. Instead, the company would use an approach adopted by X, formerly Twitter, in which users would volunteer to write “community notes” under misleading posts.
Echoing rhetoric from Trump and his supporters, Zuckerberg said there was “too much censorship,” and he wants to work with the president “to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
“The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US,” he said in the video.
Meta’s fact-checking partners pushed back against allegations of bias.
“We fact check on all sides, regardless of where it comes on a political spectrum. We are about the facts, not about the politics,” said Alan Duke, co-founder and editor-in-chief of fact-checking site Lead Stories.
Meta made other changes as well, saying the bar to remove content from its sites will be far higher than before. It changed its policy against hateful conduct to “allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,” a decision advocacy groups criticized.
Meta is also looking at reincorporating its company from Delaware to Texas and other states that might have more favorable legal landscapes, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. A Meta spokesperson declined to confirm the report, but noted “There are no plans to move the company’s corporate headquarters from California.”
The changes come as Meta is surging financially. In 2024, Meta’s revenue was $164.5 billion, up 22% compared with 2023, the company reported on Wednesday. The social media giant’s net income last year grew 59% to $62.36 billion. And shares of its stock, which closed Friday at just above $689, are up more than 76% over the last 12 months.
During the company’s quarterly earnings call, Zuckerberg praised Trump again.
“We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad and I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock,” he said.
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