Zuckerberg: pressure from the Biden administration to censor corona posts

The US government has pressured the social media company Meta during the corona pandemic to circulate messages about the virus on its platforms. The CEO of the company Mark Zuckerberg said this. Meta is the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among others.

“For months in 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including from the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams to censor some Covid-19 content, including humor and satire,” wrote Zuckerberg in a letter to the House of Representatives committee.

According to Zuckerberg, this pressure caused a lot of frustration among Meta employees, “if we didn’t agree with it.” He says “ultimately our decision was to remove certain content.”

It is not clear how many messages are involved. However, Facebook announced in the summer of 2021 that it had blocked more than 20 million messages or videos containing disinformation about Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic – more than a year earlier . It is not known what content was removed under government pressure.

In the letter, which the committee published online publishedZuckerberg says he regrets decisions to delete messages. He also regrets not speaking up about the pressure from the White House earlier.

“I believe the government’s pressure was wrong and I’m sorry we haven’t been clearer about that,” he wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Zuckerberg also says he will push back more if there are further requests from the US government to remove messages on Meta platforms.

Zuckerberg is not the only tech boss to criticize past interventions in social media. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, also previously said that some messages on the messaging service have been blocked for too long.

The CEO of Meta confirms in his letter that he is impartial in the election battle for the presidency between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. “My aim is to be neutral and not to play a role, or even appear to play a role,” he writes.

The White House has yet to respond to Zuckerberg’s letter.