Meta donated a million dollars to an inauguration fund for Donald Trump, a further sign of the desire of the boss of the technology giant, Mark Zuckerberg, to try to build bridges with the president-elect.
Trump has previously been highly critical of Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook – calling the platform “anti-Trump” in 2017.
But the two men dined at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in November, a meeting Mr. Zuckerberg later described himself as “grateful” for.
Inauguration funds are used to finance events and activities when a new president takes office – some view them as an attempt to curry favor with a new administration.
Meta is not believed to have made similar donations to President Joe Biden's inaugural fund in 2020 or Trump's previous such fund in 2016.
The donation was confirmed on Wednesday by CBS, the BBC's US media partner, and was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The BBC has contacted Meta for comment.
Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on January 20.
Relations between Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg have always been much less cordial.
They were particularly embittered when Facebook and Instagram suspended the former president's accounts in 2021, after he said he had praised those involved in the violence at the Capitol on January 6.
Since then, Trump has waged a war of words against Meta, calling Facebook the “enemy of the people” in March.
He said a law that would see TikTok banned in the United States unless it was sold by its parent company ByteDance would unfairly benefit Facebook.
In August, Mr. Zuckerberg told Republican lawmakers in a letter that he regretted giving in to pressure from the Biden administration to “censor” some content from Facebook and Instagram during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump wrote in a book published in September that Mr. Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he tried to interfere in the 2024 election.
But the president-elect seems to have since softened his position.
He said in a podcast in October that it was “good” that Mr. Zuckerberg “stayed out of the election,” and thanked him for a personal phone call after facing an assassination attempt.
However, Mr. Zuckerberg remains much less close to Trump than his compatriot Elon Musk.
The owner of Tesla and
This led to Mr Musk being put in charge of a new Department of Government Effectiveness (Doge).
There has been no such rapprochement between Mr Musk and Mr Zuckerberg – although the once-rumored cage fight between them now appears to be over.
