From a New York Times Media Equation column by Ben Smith headlined “What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump?”:
Last Nov. 20, NBC News broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and a Facebook board member, Peter Thiel, had dined together at the White House the previous month. “It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed,” the report said.
That was it. Nothing else has emerged since. Not the date, not who arranged the menu, the venue, the seating, not the full guest list. And not whether some kind of deal got done between two of the most powerful men in the world. The news cycle moved on, and the dinner became one of the unsolved mysteries of American power. . . .
Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, pulled together the dinner on Oct. 22 on short notice after he learned that Mr. Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, would be in Washington for a cryptocurrency hearing on Capitol Hill, a person familiar with the planning said. The dinner, the person said, took place in the Blue Room on the first floor of the White House. The guest list included Mr. Thiel, a Trump supporter, and his husband, Matt Danzeisen; Melania Trump; Mr. Kushner; and Ivanka Trump. . . .
Jesse Lehrich, the co-founder of Accountable Tech, a new nonprofit group pushing Facebook to tighten controls on its platform, suggested that the two men have a tacit nonaggression pact. “Trump can rage at Big Tech and Mark can say he’s disgusted by Trump’s posts, but at the end of the day the status quo serves both of their interests,” Mr. Lehrich said. . . .
Mr. Trump, for his part, has been notably softer on Facebook than on Amazon, Google, Twitter or Netflix at a moment when his regulatory apparatus often focuses on the political enemies he identifies in tweets. . . .
Facebook has always had a keener ear to the right side of Washington than much of Silicon Valley, directed in part by Joel Kaplan, a Zuckerberg friend and former Bush administration official who is Facebook’s vice president of global public policy. . . .
The summer of 2020 is one of those moments when corporate Washington starts to panic. What had looked like deft Trump-era politics now looks like exposure and risk. Top Democrats, including Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Nancy Pelosi — who was infuriated when a distorted video of her went viral — have singled out Facebook as a bad actor Democrats Have singled . . .
While executives across Facebook insist that Mr. Zuckerberg’s position on free speech on the platform is a matter of long-term planning and principle, not political expediency, his political team also recognizes that they are badly out of position for a Democratic administration. And in recent days, Facebook has been eager to show its independence from the White House. . . .
Mr. Zuckerberg has not budged, however, on his core insistence that Mr. Trump should be able to say what he wants on the platform, and most of what he wants in ads — including false statements, as long as they aren’t misleading on specific, narrow topics, like the census. But he did reportedly tell Mr. Trump that he objected, personally, to Mr. Trump’s warning that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” And he and Ms. Chan wrote to scientists funded by their nonprofit organization that they were “deeply shaken and disgusted by President Trump’s divisive and incendiary rhetoric.”
Those gestures may have appeased Facebook’s work force, but they’ve gone largely unnoticed in Washington.
“All the big companies tacked to the right after Trump won, and Facebook probably moved farther than the others,” said Nu Wexler, a Democrat who worked in policy communications for Facebook in Washington. “But the politics of tech are changing, and companies should be worried about Democrats as well. The days of just keeping the president happy are over.”
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Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined The Times in 2020 after eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Before that, he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer and The New York Sun
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