Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta has donated US$1 million to US President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration fund, multiple media outlets in the US have reported. This news was first published on The Wall Street Journal. The news comes two weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
It is worth noting that Facebook was one of the first major social media platforms to suspend Trump's account following the January 6, 2021 riots on the US Capitol Hill in Washington DC. The account was reinstated last year but with 'railings'. They 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 he was ready to “support the national renewal of America under Trump's leadership,” Fox News quoted Trump adviser Stephen Miller as saying.
When Meta suspended Trump's Facebook account, it was seen as a big statement against him and in favor of President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the US presidential election 2020.
However, Mark Zuckerberg himself said earlier this year that the Biden-Harris administration had “repeatedly pressured” Meta to censor Covid-related posts. Zuckerberg has written this in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee.
He also said he regretted not being 'more vocal' about it earlier.
“In 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and were very aggressive toward our teams when we did not agree. Expressed disappointment. Ultimately, it was our decision whether to remove content, and we make our own decisions, including the COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in light of this pressure, ” Zuckerberg said in the letter.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more vocal about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we would have made today. As 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 and if something like this happens again we will not back it. Ready to move.”
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