Mark Zuckerberg said Trump is 'exactly the same in person as you'd expect him to be from the stuff that he says publicly'
- In a new interview with Axios, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described what it was like meeting President Donald Trump.
- "He's kind of exactly the same in person as you'd expect him to be from the stuff that he says publicly," Zuckerberg said.
- Zuckerberg had a meeting and a private dinner with Trump in late 2019.
When Mark Zuckerberg made a rare trip to Washington, DC, last October to be grilled by lawmakers, the Facebook CEO also had a private dinner with President Donald Trump.
It was the first time Zuckerberg and Trump met, and it left an impression on Zuckerberg.
"One of the things that I found interesting is that he's kind of exactly the same in person as you'd expect him to be from the stuff that he says publicly," Zuckerberg said in a new interview with Axios.
The details from that meeting between two of the world's most powerful people are unclear, and Zuckerberg hasn't offered much when asked. In fact, reporters first heard about the dinner in late November.
Zuckerberg did reveal some information during an interview on "CBS This Morning" last year.
"We talked about a number of things that were on his mind and some of the topics that you read about in the news around our work," Zuckerberg told the host Gayle King.
Though Zuckerberg didn't say much more, he denied that Trump attempted to lobby him on political ads on Facebook.
"No. I think some of the stuff people talk about or think gets discussed in these discussions are not really how that works," Zuckerberg said at the time. "I also want to respect that it was a private dinner with private discussion."
Facebook has faced criticism for its stance on political advertising — it doesn't fact-check politicians in political ads or remove false information from them. Competing social-media platforms have taken different stances: Twitter outright banned political advertising, and YouTube has removed hundreds of political ads from its platform.
Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that Facebook would take precautionary measures ahead of the US presidential election, including one that directly affects how both campaigns are able to advertise on Facebook.
"In the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims," he said in a Facebook post. "So in the week before the election, we won't accept new political or issue ads."
Hours after the announcement, the Trump campaign criticized the new policy in a statement shared with Business Insider.
"In the last seven days of the most important election in our history, President Trump will be banned from defending himself on the largest platform in America," said Samantha Zager, the Trump campaign's deputy national press secretary. "When millions of voters will be making their decisions, the President will be silenced by the Silicon Valley Mafia, who will at the same time allow corporate media to run their biased ads to swing voters in key states."
Facebook will still run political ads for both campaigns and for various election-related issues in the week leading up to Election Day.
"Advertisers will be able to continue running ads they started running before the final week and adjust the targeting for those ads," Zuckerberg said, "but those ads will already be published transparently in our Ads Library so anyone, including fact-checkers and journalists, can scrutinize them."
Notably, Zuckerberg said Facebook would stand by these measures in the run-up to the election. "To ensure there are clear and consistent rules," he said, "we are not planning to make further changes to our election-related policies between now and the official declaration of the result."
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