Mark Zuckerberg submitted a letter to the House Judiciary committee last 26 August revealing the that his teams were "pressured" by the Biden White House to censor some content around the Covid-19 pandemic.
"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," the chairman and CEO of the social media company Meta said.
Zuckerberg added that the pressure he felt in 2021 was "wrong" and he came to "regret" that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added that with the "benefit of hindsight and new information" there were decisions made in 2021 that wouldn't be made 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," Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden said in July of 2021 that social media platforms are "killing people" with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a "serious threat to public health."
A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was encouraging "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," according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg in the letter also said the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation around Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg said 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 changed its policies and processes to "make sure this doesn’t happen again" and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.
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