Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was urged by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, such as humor and satire.
“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for months to remove certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he experienced in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration from either side – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.
President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media networks are “killing people” with misinformation about 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 “major public health risk.”
A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”
Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his goal is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are left-leaning. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.
In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”
In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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