Senior officials in the Biden administration pressured Meta Platforms to censor COVID-19 content during the pandemic, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, adding that he would push back if this were to happen again.
In a letter dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg told the judiciary committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that he regretted not speaking up about this pressure earlier, as well as some decisions the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner had made around removing certain content.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was posted by the Committee on the Judiciary on its Facebook page.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
“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 letter was addressed to Jim Jordan, the chair of the committee and a Republican. In its Facebook post, the committee called the letter a “big win for free speech” and said that Zuckerberg had admitted that “Facebook censored Americans.”
In the letter, Zuckerberg also said he would not make any contributions to support electoral infrastructure in this year’s presidential election so as to “not play a role one way or another” in the November vote.
During the last election, which was held in 2020 during the pandemic, the billionaire contributed $400 million via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropy venture with his wife, to support election infrastructure, a move that drew criticism and lawsuits from some groups that said the move was partisan.
Republicans in Congress have been targeting social media and tech companies in recent months, alleging that they are suppressing or censoring conservative views.
The letter also touched on controversy regarding Facebook’s handling of a story regarding U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter that was published by the New York Post.
Zuckerberg said the story was “temporarily demoted” while Facebook fact-checkers probed the possibility of it being “a potential Russian disinformation operation.”
The Meta CEO said the story was ultimately found not to be part of such an operation and that the platform has changed its policy such that posts in the United States are no longer demoted while fact checkers investigate them.
