Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Meta, stated in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that his teams were “pressured” by the Biden administration to censor some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Zuckerberg, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured Meta for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as humor and satire, leading to frustration when disagreements arose.
The big picture: Zuckerberg expressed regret over feeling pressured and the lack of outspokenness from his company in 2021.
- He mentioned that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” decisions made in 2021 would not be made today.
- Meta has since changed its policies and processes to ensure similar incidents do not happen again, including not demoting content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers, as was done before.
- Zuckerberg also revealed that the FBI warned Meta about potential Russian disinformation around Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election, which led Meta to temporarily demote reporting from the New York Post about Biden family corruption until their fact-checkers could review the story.
Driving the news: Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter and accused the Biden administration of pressuring Meta to censor Americans and throttle the Hunter Biden laptop story.
- Zuckerberg said that he will not repeat actions taken in 2020 when he supported “electoral infrastructure” and made contributions benefiting election jurisdictions.
- He emphasized the goal of neutrality and avoiding contributions that could be perceived as benefiting one party over the other.
The backstory: Zuckerberg’s company has faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, with accusations of bias against conservatives.
- In recent years, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees lean left but claimed that the company prevents political bias from influencing its decisions.
