Mark Zuckerberg says Meta was ‘pressured’ by Biden administration to censor Covid-related content in 2021

By Colin McCullogh, CNN

(CNN) — Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of the social media company Meta, said in a letter to the House Judiciary committee on Monday that his teams were “pressured” by the Biden White House to censor some content around the Covid-19 pandemic.

“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,” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the judiciary committee, Zuckerberg said the pressure he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he came to “regret” that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information” there were decisions made in 2021 that wouldn’t be made 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,” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden said in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson 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 clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present,” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg in the letter also said the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation around Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, 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 letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but he said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg said his goal is to be “neutral” so will not be “making a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media giant and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. 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 contractors, 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 of this year, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”

News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education group, said there have been over five hundred instance of misinformation during the 2024 election cycle, including fake celebrity endorsements.

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