Donald Trump said Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called him multiple times over the past few weeks, including after the former US President faced an assassination attempt in mid-July.
After a bullet grazed his ear, Trump was photographed with his fist in the air, telling supporters to “fight.”
“He said, ‘That was really amazing, it was very brave,’” Trump said during a Fox Business interview on Friday, adding that Zuckerberg “respected me for what I did that day.”
Trump said that the Meta CEO told him he was not going to support a Democrat in the election because of this respect. Zuckerberg has said publicly that he would not endorse any candidate for President, and has avoided making public endorsements for the last several elections. He did, though, call Trump’s reaction to the assassination attempt “badass” during an interview with Bloomberg in mid-July.
Trump said that Zuckerberg called him again this week to apologize over how a photo of the assassination attempt was handled by Meta’s automated moderation systems. A photo of Trump with his fist raised in the air was incorrectly appended with a fact-check label this week after other versions of that photo had been manipulated to show the Secret Service agents next to him smiling. Meta automatically added a fact-check label to the doctored version of the photo, but the automated systems also added the label to the original by mistake.
“Given the similarities between the doctored photo and the original image – which are only subtly (although importantly) different — our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo, too,” Meta’s VP of Global Policy, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a blog post this week. “Our teams worked to quickly correct this mistake.”
Zuckerberg “actually apologized — he said they made a mistake,” Trump said of their phone conversations. “I believe Mark Zuckerberg. He called me a lot.”
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, after Trump’s interview, spokesman Andy Stone reiterated Zuckerberg’s stance. “Mark’s already been public about the fact that he’s not endorsing either candidate, just as he hasn’t in prior elections.” The company didn’t comment further.
The interactions between Meta’s chief executive and the former President are notable given the history between the two men. Meta banned Trump from Facebook and Instagram for two years, saying his posts could lead to violence after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots in DC. Trump, meanwhile, has called Facebook the “enemy of the people” and insinuated that he would try and jail Zuckerberg if he is elected President again for being an “Election Fraudster.”