Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged he “messed up” by letting his companies Facebook and Meta get too involved in politics.

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whats App. Zuckerberg spoke at a podcast event in San Francisco earlier this month at which he bemoaned the fact the his companies and their employees had weighed in too much about political matters.

“The political environment, I think I didn’t have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” Zuckerberg said, according to The New York Times. “I think it’s going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand is back to the place that it could have been, if I hadn’t messed up in the first place.”

Attempting to establish a positive relationship with former President Trump, Zuckerberg has spoken with him twice in the last few months.

According to the Times, at a conference this summer, Zuckerberg said he “regretted hiring employees at his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left on some causes”

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In an August 26 letter to Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, Zuckerberg wrote:

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of thus pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.

Zuckerberg has hired Republican strategist Brian Baker to ameliorate his position with right-wing media and Republican officials, the Times noted.

After Meta removed images of the assassination attempt on former President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Zuckerberg called Trump to apologize.