Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior US government officials during the Biden administration had pressured his social media company to censor Covid-19-related content during the pandemic and added that he would oppose it if it happened again.
In a letter dated August 26, Zuckerberg told the US House Judiciary Committee that he regretted not speaking out sooner about this pressure, as well as some decisions the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had made around the removal of certain content.
“I think the pressure from the Government was wrong and I regret that we were not more frank about it”
“In 2021, senior officials in the Biden Administration, including in the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19-related content, including humor and satire, and expressed significant frustration with our teams when we did not agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was posted by the Judiciary Committee on its Facebook page.
“I think the pressure from the government was misguided and I regret that we were not more forthright about it,” he wrote. “I also think we made some decisions that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we would not make today.”
The White House and Meta did not respond to a request for comment outside U.S. business hours.
Committee calls letter “great victory for freedom of expression”
The letter was addressed to Jim Jordan, the committee’s chairman and a Republican. In its Facebook post, the committee called the letter “a huge victory for free speech” and said Zuckerberg had admitted that “Facebook was censoring Americans.”
In the letter, Zuckerberg also said he would not make any contributions to support election infrastructure in this year’s presidential election so as “not to play a role one way or another” in the November vote.
Mark Zuckerberg, before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 2024
During the last election, which was held in 2020 during the pandemic, the billionaire contributed $400 million through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropic company with his wife, to support election infrastructure, a move that drew criticism and lawsuits from some groups who said the move was partisan.
In the same letter, dated Monday, Zuckerberg also admits that he made a mistake by removing from Meta a New York Post article about the controversial content of the laptop of the son of the President of the United States, Hunter Biden, in the middle of the 2020 election campaign.
Thus, he explains that, based on a warning from the FBI about “a possible Russian disinformation operation” in relation to Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, where he was a member of the board of directors, they decided to remove the content from the ‘New York Post’ and send it to their team of fact-checkers.
Meta withdrew an article from the ‘NY Post’ about Hunter Biden in the middle of the election campaign after a warning from the FBI
“It was clear that the report was not Russian disinformation and, in retrospect, we should not have downplayed the story,” he said, adding that Meta has developed new policies to ensure “this does not happen again.”
The publication of the aforementioned New York tabloid dealt with tens of thousands of emails from Hunter and his business partners, which would show how he had obtained certain business deals abroad thanks to his surname.
Those stories and rumours about the contents of this laptop, which was also said to contain videos about the dissolute life of Biden’s second son, were used by Donald Trump during the campaign, and even in the television debates, to attack the man who would later become President of the United States.
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