Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee has alleged that the Biden-Harris administration “repeatedly pressurised” Meta’s teams to censor posts related to Covid.
He further said that the platform had to make some changes, that “with the benefit of hindsight and new information,” they won’t make today. Zuckerberg also said he ‘regrets’ not being “more outspoken” about it.
“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 this pressure,” Zuckerberg said in the letter.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” he added.
The House Committee on the Judiciary, of the Republican Party informed about the Meta CEO’s letter on social media platform X.
“Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big win for free speech.,” the post read.
Zuckerberg recalled another episode in the letter, in which he alleged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned Meta about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
Following this, Meta demoted a story on corruption allegations involving Joe Biden’s family, but Meta CEO claims that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and the story shouldn’t have been demoted.
“That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he stated.
