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Mark Zuckerberg alleges Biden-Harris administration ‘pressured’ Meta to censor Covid-related posts: ‘I regret that we…’
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the Biden-Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" Meta's teams.
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that the Biden-Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" Meta's teams to censor Covid-related posts. The Meta Chief Executive Officer also claimed that the platform had to make changes that "with the benefit of hindsight and new information," they would not make today. He added that he “regrets” that he was not "more outspoken" about it.
What does the letter say?
"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,” according to ANI.
"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, posted Zuckerberg’s letter on 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 caption read.
In the letter, Zuckerberg also recalled that the FBI warned Meta about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burism before the 2020 election. Meta subsequently demoted a story on allegations of corruption involving the Biden family. However, Zuckerberg asserted that the story should not have been demoted as it was not Russian disinformation.
"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," Zuckerberg said.
