Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Monday letter to US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Chairman Jim Jordan(R-OH) admitted that Facebook caved to pressure from President Joe Biden administration to censor Americans, regarding COVID-19, election and other content including satire trolling far-left Democrat politicians and bureaucrats.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that senior officials repeatedly pressured Meta to take down specific content. He had told Jordan that in 2021, "senior officials" from the Biden administration and White House "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire."
When Facebook did not agree with the censorship, Zuckerberg said, the Biden administration expressed a lot of frustration.
"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," the Meta chief wrote. "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it."
The Meta chief also admitted that Facebook throttled posts about the explosive New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained explicit pictures, emails and other documents, ahead of the 2020 US election. He said that suppressing the story was a mistake.
"There’s a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position," Zuckerberg wrote. "Our platforms are for everyone -- we’re about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety."
He promised the company will rebuff such censorship demands going forward.
"I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today," Zuckerberg wrote. "Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens."
The House first subpoenaed Meta for documents and information on Feb. 15, 2023, related to content moderation and Meta's engagements with the executive branch to censor speech. The committee was investigating whether, and to what extent, the executive branch pressured or worked with private companies to stifle certain kinds of speech at the request of the government, which could potentially be a violation of the First Amendment of the US constitution.
