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'Challenge accepted': MAGA officials tried to 'stiffen Trump’s spine' against Meta CEO

Although Silicon Valley billionaire Mark Zuckerberg — whose Meta owns the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram — was critical of President Donald Trump in the past, he reached out to him after the 2024 election and attended Trump's inauguration. Zuckerberg has met with Trump three times in 2025, but according to Semafor reporter Ben Smith, some of the Meta CEO's "key antagonists in the federal government" showed up in the White House Oval Office on Tuesday, April 8.

Smith, in an article published on April 14, explains, "The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement. Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump's spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta."

According to Smith, a third Trump ally was present as well: far-right MAGA attorney Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project.

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Davis is known for his inflammatory attacks on not only Democrats, but also, on conservatives he considers insufficiently MAGA.

"While none of the participants in the meeting with Trump would share its contents," Smith reports, "Davis appeared to refer to it in a pair of X posts last Tuesday: 'Challenge accepted,' he posted at 1:32 pm, responding to a Trump supporter's concern that Zuckerberg had the White House 'on lock.' That evening, Davis replied to his own post: 'Mission accomplished.'"

Davis recently railed against Zuckerberg during an appearance on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast.

The attorney told Bannon, "Mark Zuckerberg rigged and stole the 2020 election, and that's why President Trump got chased out of the WH, why he faced 4 years of unprecedented, republic-ending lawfare…. I just can’t believe that President Trump would let Mark Zuckerberg go into the Oval Office and take down his pants."

READ MORE: 'Waiting for Vance to smash through the door': Trump officials give Bukele a pass on Oval Office garb

Read the full Semafor article at this link.


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'Ploy to avoid being regulated': GOP senator and MAGA podcaster rip Zuckerberg’s pro-Trump turn

Tech CEOs have lined up to show fealty to President-elect Donald Trump by showering his inaugural committee with $1 million donations. But their obeisance isn't convincing some of Trump's diehard supporters.

The Washington Post reported Saturday on the tech industry's about-face from almost unilaterally backing Democrats to giving large sums to Trump. Silicon Valley cornerstones like Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Threads), Google, Amazon and others have all lined up to pay respects to the incoming administration with seven-figure donations despite only giving a fraction of that amount to President Joe Biden's inauguration.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in particular has been subjected to criticism over his decision to stop fact-checking content posted to Facebook, suspend diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, allow users to get away with saying LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill and for putting Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan in charge of global affairs. Zuckerberg also appointed UFC owner Dana White — a prominent Trump supporter — to Meta's board of directors (Zuckerberg is a practitioner of mixed martial arts and tore his ACL while sparring in 2023).

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Zuckerberg's decision to stop moderating content is provoking fears of Facebook taking a sharp turn to the right, as X did after billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk purchased the platform formerly known as Twitter. Intercept tech reporter Sam Biddle posted to Bluesky that he obtained a leaked internal Meta document that examples of posts that are now considered acceptable. This reportedly includes "calling children 'trannies,' 'Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,' and 'immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of s—.'"

"[Meta's] document also provides ample examples of newly permissible insults aimed at specific gender identities or sexual orientations, including 'Gay people are sinners' and 'Trans people are immoral,'" Biddle wrote in his report. "A post stating 'Lesbians are so stupid' would remain prohibited as a 'mental insult,' though 'Trans people are mentally ill' is marked as allowed."

However, progressives aren't the only ones angry with Zuckerberg. In a post to her official X account, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she was suspicious about Zuckerberg's true motivation after he announced the changes to Meta.

"Now that President Trump is about to take office, Meta has allegedly decided to stop censoring conservatives," Blackburn tweeted. "This is a ploy to avoid being regulated. We will not be fooled."

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Podcaster Candace Owens also cast doubt on Zuckerberg's new embrace of right-wing politics. The Post reported that Owens was skeptical of the tech CEO who once suspended Trump's account after the January 6 insurrection and banned accounts that propagated election denialism.

"Now he believes in free speech because of the election results?" Owens said.

In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg expanded on his pro-MAGA shift. He complained that Biden administration officials would 'curse' and 'scream' at him in conversations about content moderation, though Techdirt reporter Mike Masnick found that the only instance of this happening was in an email from Biden official Rob Flaherty. In that email, Flaherty was referring to a bug on Instagram that prevented people from following Biden's official account, which Meta apologized for and corrected.

Click here to read the Post's article in full (subscription required).

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'Serious harms': 42 state AGs sue Meta for intentionally trying to get young users addicted

A bipartisan group of 42 state attorneys general is suing Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — for allegedly developing their products with the intent to keep young users addicted.

According to CNBC, the lawsuit accuses Meta of designing algorithms and features for both of their main social media platforms meant to push young users into constantly staying on the apps. These features include excessive notifications showing users new likes and the infinite scrolling feature that motivates a user to consistently view new content for hours at a time. The AGs also say the company violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by gathering data on users under 13 without parental consent.

"While Meta has publicly denied and downplayed these harmful effects, it cannot credibly plead ignorance,” the Office of New York Attorney General Letitia James stated. “Meta’s own internal research documents show its awareness that its products harm young users. Indeed, internal studies that Meta commissioned – and kept private until they were leaked by a whistleblower and publicly reported – reveal that Meta has known for years about these serious harms associated with young users’ time spent on its platforms."

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The whistleblower James referred to is former Meta employee Frances Haugen, who leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal documents in 2021 to both Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The leaked documents showed how the company knew its products contributed to the psychological harm of teen users, as well as the company's awareness of how human traffickers used Meta apps to conduct their illicit business, and how purveyors of misinformation manipulated algorithms.

Instagram, in particular, was singled out for its unique harm on teenage users. According to the documents, Meta's internal researchers found that 13% of girls in the UK and 6% of girls in the US attributed suicidal thoughts to Instagram content. 32% of girls reported that Instagram made them feel bad about themselves. Additionally, 14% of boys reportedly also said Instagram was detrimental to their self-esteem.

Washington, DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb told CNBC that while everyone experiences "FOMO" (fear of missing out) in regard to social media notifications, tween, pre-teen and teen social media users can experience it much more than others.

"All of that is part of the built-in DNA that Meta uses to keep people hooked," he said.

READ MORE: 'Shattered the morale': Meta employees offer stinging rebuke of Mark Zuckerberg amid mass layoffs

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Facebook changing 'race-blind' hate speech policy

San Francisco (AFP) - Facebook on Thursday said it is revising its systems to prioritize blocking slurs against Black people, gays and other groups historically targeted by vitriol, no longer automatically filtering out barbs aimed broadly at whites, men or Americans. The change in Facebook's algorithm is a shift from the social network's ethnicity and gender-neutral system that removed anti-white comments and posts such as "Men are dumb" or "Americans are stupid." "We know that hate speech targeted towards under-represented groups can be the most harmful, which is why we have focused our tech...

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