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Mark Zuckerberg has now said that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Covid-19 content back in 2021.
The CEO of Meta – Facebook and Instagram’s parent company – wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday where he acknowledged that senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humorous and satire.”
In the letter, titled to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg admitted that he regretted not pushing back more on the administration.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he said.
“I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Covid-19 misinformation was rife on social media platforms during the pandemic, despite tech companies’ efforts to curtail it.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court backed the Biden administration when it ruled the government can ask social media companies to remove harmful misinformation from their platforms.
In a 6-3 decision, justices threw out a lower court ruling that limited the government’s ability to communicate with social media companies, saying that decision was incorrect because the challengers – two states and five social media users – failed to show they were the proper groups to bring the lawsuit.
Zuckerberg did not go into specific detail about the content Facebook felt pressured to remove, but warned: “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.”
The billionaire tech entrepreneur also admitted Facebook was wrong to suppress a The New York Post story about Hunter Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
In October 2020, the newspaper reported it had accessed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop that he had left at a Delaware repair shop. This included a so-called “smoking gun” email where the now-president’s embattled son had offered to arrange for his father to meet an executive at Burisma – the Ukrainian energy company which Hunter sat on the board of.
News organizations, including others owned by News International boss Rupert Murdoch, initially passed on the story because the authenticity of the emails could not be verified.
In Monday’s letter, Zuckerberg said the platform “shouldn’t have demoted” the New York Post story detailing the corruption allegations while waiting for fact checkers to review it ahead of the 2020 election.
He revealed that Facebook has since changed its policies in the wake of the controversy.
“The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
The letter was hailed as a “big win for free speech” by House Judiciary Republicans, who shared the 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,” they said.
A White House spokesperson told The Independent the Biden administration “encouraged 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,” they said.
