The CEO and founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly expressed regret for caving to pressure from the White House to censor content on Facebook and Instagram.
According to Zuckerberg, senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Meta to remove certain content related to COVID-19 in 2021.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta should not have demoted a New York Post story about President Biden’s family before the 2020 election, stating that the company should not compromise its content standards due to political pressure.
“That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.
“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers,” he wrote.
Zuckerberg also said he would not repeat contributions he made in the last presidential election cycle to fund election infrastructure, saying that although they were intended to be nonpartisan, some people still interpreted the effort as benefiting one party or the other.
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution to this cycle,” he added.
The US House Judiciary Committee responded positively to Zuckerberg’s admissions, interpreting his letter as a victory for free speech and election integrity.
Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) highlighted the letter’s implications, stating, “Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
He added that the statement was a “Big win for free speech”.