Mark Zuckerberg has gotten a fair amount of grief for his refusal to change Facebook’s policy on political ads, as well as for the perhaps related secret dinner meeting he took last month with Donald Trump, a guy who very much wants the social media giant to maintain its laissez faire attitude toward political content. But the Facebook CEO defended both on Monday, telling CBS This Morning that “people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying” and “judge for themselves the character” of said politicians.

Facebook has been under increasing pressure over its handling of political ads and false or misleading information, with critics, including Elizabeth Warren, demanding changes to its policy. Zuckerberg has dismissed going as far as Twitter, which is banning political ads altogether, but is said to be weighing changes to how such ads are targeted and labeled. That has rankled the Trump re-election campaign, which accused Facebook last month of attempting to “take important tools away from us for 2020.”

It was in this context that the president himself had Zuckerberg and Facebook board member Peter Theil over for diner at the White House in October. That meeting wasn’t disclosed by either the White House or Facebook, but was revealed in an NBC News report last month. It wasn’t clear at the time what was discussed at the dinner, but the meeting raised eyebrows among critics, who suggested Zuckerberg was cozying up to the president and other conservatives. “Amid antitrust scrutiny, Facebook is going on a charm offensive with Republican lawmakers,” Warren tweeted when news of the meeting broke. “And now, Mark Zuckerberg and one of Facebook's board members—a major Trump donor—had a secret dinner with Trump. This is corruption, plain and simple.”

But Zuckerberg defended the meeting on Monday, telling Gayle King that nothing untoward occurred during the dinner — but declined to provide details about the discussion. “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,” a cagey Zuckerberg said, dismissing the notion that Trump lobbied him on any matters. “I think some of the stuff that people talk about or think gets discussed in these discussions are not really how that works.” Of course, that defense is unlikely to satisfy critics who have raised questions about his interactions with Trump and his allies — and if they have anything to do with his stubborn insistence that changes to paid political ads would amount to censorship. On the contrary, his tortured explanation only exacerbates the lack of trust Zuckerberg has fostered among lawmakers and the public.

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