Uneasy ties between Facebook, U.S. president
It may be a mere alignment of interests or something more
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.
But I was able to pry some of those details loose last week from White House officials along with current and former senior Facebook employees and people they speak to. Most said they would only talk on the condition their names not be used, since the company is not eager to call attention to Zuckerberg’s relationship with the U.S. president.
Their accounts painted a picture of an unusual gathering — something in between a highstakes state dinner between the leaders of uneasily allied superpowers and the awkward rehearsal dinner before a marriage that has both families a little rattled.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, pulled together the dinner on Oct. 22 on short notice after he learned that 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 Thiel, a Trump supporter, and his husband, Matt Danzeisen; Melania Trump; Kushner; and Ivanka Trump. The president, a person who has spoken to Zuckerberg said, did most of the talking. The atmosphere was convivial, another person who got an account of the dinner said. Trump likes billionaires and likes people who are useful to him, and Zuckerberg right now is both.
But looming over the private dinner is a question: Did Trump and Zuckerberg reach some kind of accommodation? Zuckerberg needs, and appears to be getting, a pass both on angry tweets from the president and the serious threats of lawsuits and regulation that face other big tech companies. Trump needs access to Facebook’s advertising platform and its viral power.
Both men are getting what they want, and it’s fair to wonder whether this is a mere alignment of interests or something more.
“I believe they have a deal,” said Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who is now a fierce critic, who added that it was “probably implied rather than explicit.”
“Mark’s deal with Trump is highly utilitarian,” he said. “It’s basically about getting free rein and protection from regulation. Trump needs Facebook’s thumb on the scale to win this election.”
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,” Lehrich said.
Officials at Facebook and in the administration scoff at the notion that there is some kind of secret pact. And it’s hard to imagine that anyone — certainly not Zuckerberg — would be dumb enough to make a secret deal with a president known for keeping neither secrets nor deals.
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.
Still Facebook, like other tech giants, finds itself in a political bind: Democrats hate and distrust them because they spread right-wing misinformation and helped elect Donald Trump; Republicans hate and distrust them because they’re run by California liberals and delete some right-wing speech. But Facebook has avoided that trap deftly, by moving faster than its competitors to mollify conservatives.