Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was influenced by the White House in the year 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical and humorous posts.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden White House, such as the administration, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor some content about COVID-19, such as humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he experienced in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. He further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“Like I told our teams back then, 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, ” Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A spokesperson from the White House responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg further noted in the letter that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.
Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.
In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the necessary resources to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his goal is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”
In June, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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