Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was pressured by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.
“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the administration, constantly urged our teams for an extended period to remove some content about COVID-19, such as satirical content, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.
President Biden stated in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A spokesperson from the White House responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position has been consistent and clear: we believe tech companies and other private actors should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg also noted in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.
Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”
Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not recur” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “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 members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused 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 examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”
In June, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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