Mark Zuckerberg meets with Donald Trump, after the Republican’s veto

Facebook is among the social networks that banned Trump after the attack on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, which claimed the lives of five people.

This meeting comes at a time when Trump indicated that he is considering appointing an official in charge of the Artificial Intelligence sector of the White House, to coordinate federal policy and government use of the technology, as reported by Axios on Tuesday.

Tesla boss Elon Musk will not be the “AI czar” but is expected to be involved in shaping the future of the debate and use cases, the report adds.

Although it was not clear whether tycoon Musk, who recently challenged Zuckerberg to a fight, also attended the dinner, since the election the owner of X has been a regular at the Mar-a-Lago residence.

Trump’s future deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, told Fox News on Wednesday that Zuckerberg “has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter and a participant in this change that we’re seeing across America.”

“He wants to support the renewal of America under President Trump’s leadership,” Miller added.

While in Trump’s first term they marked distances, the technology heavyweights this time welcomed the Republican’s electoral victory, among them Zuckerberg.

What happened at the Capitol and why did Trump block Facebook?

On January 6, 2021, thousands of supporters of then-President of the United States, Donald Trump, broke into the United States Capitol. Its objective was to prevent a Senate session from taking place where Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the November 3, 2020 elections would be certified.

Since before Election Day, Trump claimed that the election had been stolen from him, without offering any solid evidence of fraud.

Restrictions on Trump on Facebook were considered for two posts. The first of them, while the riots were happening, was a video in which the opening phrase was: “I know your pain. I know they are hurt. “We had an election that was stolen from us.”

The second was a statement stating: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so brutally and unceremoniously stripped from great patriots who have been treated unfairly for so long.”

Both posts were removed by Facebook because they violated community guidelines regarding dangerous people and organizations.

On January 7, Facebook determined to block Donald Trump from the social network indefinitely. The platform’s council determined that Trump made a speech about electoral fraud and calls to action that created an environment of risk and violence.

After that, Trump opened his own blog but closed it a month later and filed a lawsuit against Facebook, Google and Twitter for supposedly preventing “freedom of expression.” However, his attempts to be online did not end there, the now newly elected president of the United States opened his own social network: Truth Social.

The tycoon’s social network was launched in February 2022. The latest news about it is that in April 2024 he declared that he would launch a streaming platform through his social network Truth Social.

With information from AFP and Reuters.