Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was urged by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, including satirical and humorous posts.
“In 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the administration, repeatedly pressured our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. He added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”
A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg further noted in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg stated 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 updated its policies and procedures to “ensure this does not recur” 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 the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and claimed 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 Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched 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 attempted to bridge the divide 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 stated 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 of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”
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