Mark Zuckerberg also wants to play “an active role” in debates on technology in the United States. Ultimately, the company hopes above all to avoid the wrath of the elected president.
Scarecrow of Silicon Valley, Donald Trump will now have the opportunity to blow hot and cold on the tech giants. It is therefore not surprising that big companies are now trying to cajole the president-elect who will take office in January.
After Sam Altman – the boss of OpenAI – who was full of praise for Trump, it is Mark Zuckerberg's turn to place his marbles. The founder of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp…) thus assures that he wants to play “an active role in the debates (…) on maintaining American leadership in the technological sphere” announces Nick Clegg, the spokesperson for Meta in the Financial Times.
According to him, this leadership “is extremely important given all the geostrategic uncertainties in the world, and in particular the central role that AI will play.”
Artificial intelligence is precisely the crux of the matter with a few players – including Meta – who hope to offer themselves a very promising market.
“We sometimes exaggerate”
The regulation of the American sector will thus be one of Trump's projects. So to better seduce the businessman, Meta attempts a mea culpa by admitting to having “exaggerated a little”, in the past, by moderating content related to the pandemic. In August 2020, Facebook – like Twitter – had, for example, deleted a video of Trump deemed to be false about the pandemic.
“We are fully aware – because users have rightly complained about this situation – that we sometimes exaggerate, that we make mistakes and that we remove or restrict harmless or innocent content,” explains Nick Clegg.
A way for Meta to avoid a standoff with the president who increased his threats during the campaign. He thus took the side of Tiktok to better criticize Meta. “If you get rid of Tiktok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck, editor's note) will double their turnover. I don't want Facebook, which cheated in the last elections, to do better,” he wrote last March on the Truth Social network.
Tensions seem, for the moment, to have eased a little. Mark Zuckerberg had dinner in Florida with Donald Trump last week.
Thomas Leroy Journalist BFM Business
