In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Mark Zuckerberg claimed the Biden-Harris administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta’s teams to censor Covid-related posts. Meta’s CEO also claimed the platform had to make changes it would not make today “with hindsight and new information,” adding that he “regretted” not being “more forthcoming” about it.
What does the letter say?
“For months in 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed deep frustration with our teams when we did not agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to remove content, and we are accountable for our decisions, including the COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in response to that pressure,” Zuckerberg said in the letter, according to ANI.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more open about it. I also think we made some decisions that, in hindsight and with new information, we would not make today. As I told our teams at the time, I firmly believe that we should not compromise our content standards because of pressure from any government in any direction and we are ready to fight back if something like this happens again,” he added.
The Republican House Judiciary Committee posted Zuckerberg’s letter on X. “Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. The Biden-Harris administration ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook took down the Hunter Biden laptop story. A huge victory for free speech,” the caption said.
In the letter, Zuckerberg also recalled that the FBI had warned Meta before the 2020 election about a possible Russian disinformation campaign about the Biden family and Burism. Meta then downgraded an article about corruption allegations against the Biden family. However, Zuckerberg claimed that the article should not have been downgraded because it was not Russian disinformation.
“When we saw a New York Post article in the fall about corruption allegations against the family of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, we sent the article to fact-checkers for review and temporarily downgraded it while we awaited a response. It has since been clarified that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight we should not have downgraded the article,” Zuckerberg said.
