Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Contributes USD 1 Million To US President-Elect Donald Trump's Inauguration Fund: Reports

Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg led parent company of Facebook and Instagram has donated USD 1 million to US President-Elect Donald Trump's inauguration fund, reported multiple media outlets in the US. The news was published on The Wall Street Journal first. The news has broken two weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Donald Trump at the latter's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

It's worth noting that Facebook was one of the first major social media platforms to suspend Trump's account in the aftermath of January 6, 2021 riots on US Capitol Hill in Washington DC. The account was restored last years but with 'guardrails'. These were removed in July this year.

Trump has a total of 65 million followers on Facebook and Instagram.

When he dined with the president-elect, Zuckerberg told Trump that he was ready to "support the national renewal of America under Trump's leadership," as reported by Fox News which quoted Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

When Meta suspended Trump's Facebook account, it was seen as a huge statement against him and in favour of President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in US Presidential Election 2020.

However, Mark Zuckerberg himself said earlier this year that Biden-Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" Meta to censor Covid-related posts. Zuckerberg wrote this in a letter to House Judiciary Committee.

He also said he regretted not being 'more outspoken' about it before.

"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," Zuckerberg said in the letter.

"I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. 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," he added.

Published on: Thursday, December 12, 2024, 02:40 PM IST