After meeting with Kanye West, president-elect Donald Trump met with the leaders of tech companies including Apple, Facebook, and Google at Trump Tower Wednesday. Noticeably absent from the meeting was Twitter—the president-elect’s most used platform—reportedly not invited to the meeting because Twitter didn’t allow for an emoji of the Crooked Hillary hashtag during the election.
The Associated Pressreported that communications director for the Republican National Committee Sean Spicer brushed off Twitter’s exclusion from the meeting, saying, "The conference table was only so big, OK?" Politico, however, cited a source familiar with the situation saying Twitter was “bounced” from the meeting for its refusal to make emojis for the Trump campaign.
In attendance for the meeting were: Alphabet's Larry Page, Amazon's Jeff Bezos (also owner of The Washington Post, which among other Trump coverage reported about the CIA concluding Russian hacks were meant to help Trump win the election), Apple's Tim Cook (ICYMI Trump called for an Apple boycott when the company refused to unlock a phone belonging to the San Bernardino shooter), Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Google's Eric Schmidt, IBM's Ginni Rometty, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Tesla's Elon Musk, Oracle's Safra Catz, and Cisco Systems' Chuck Robbins.
Trump was friendly during the meeting, saying, "We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation. Anything we can do to help this go on, we will be there for you. You'll call my people, you'll call me. We have no formal chain of command around here."
The AP noted Silicon Valley’s vocal opposition to Trump during the election. An open letter was published in July from over 140 tech leaders, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists calling Trump a "disaster for innovation." The tech industry has also been concerned Trump would restrict free speech online and end net neutrality.
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