SAN FRANCISCO >> Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has lobbied President Donald Trump and his aides to resolve a federal antitrust lawsuit against his company that is set to go to trial April 14, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

Zuckerberg has made several trips to the White House and Mar-a-Lago to discuss the matter, along with other issues, said two of the people, who were not authorized to reveal private conversations. Most recently, he visited the White House on Wednesday morning.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Meta in 2020, during Trump’s first term, accusing the company of stifling competition by buying young startups such as Instagram and WhatsApp and preventing them from becoming fully fledged businesses. Meta could resolve the lawsuit with a settlement. It is unclear whether Zuckerberg’s efforts have led the Trump administration to consider settling.

Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, which also owns Facebook, said the company “regularly meets with policymakers to discuss issues impacting competitiveness, national security and economic growth.”

The White House did not immediately have a comment, and the FTC declined to comment. Details of the meetings were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

In its lawsuit, the FTC claimed that Meta had violated antitrust law by acquiring young rivals and depriving consumers of alternative social media platforms. The FTC argued that Meta’s 2012 purchase of the photo-sharing site Instagram for $1 billion and its 2014 deal for the messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion should not have been approved.

The company sought to “buy or bury innovators threatening to outcompete Facebook in the new mobile environment,” the FTC said in its complaint.

Meta has denied buying Instagram and WhatsApp to kill competition, and has said it invested heavily in developing innovations for the apps. Meta has also said it continues to face stiff competition from TikTok, YouTube, Snap and iMessage.

The acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp proved to be prescient. Instagram has become a core part of Meta’s business, bringing in billions in annual revenue. WhatsApp has quadrupled in size to 2 billion users, and has started generating significant revenue for Meta.

A federal judge quashed the antitrust case in 2021, but it was soon revived after the FTC added more evidence and analysis to support its claims.