Mark Zuckerberg accuses Biden-Harris administration of pressuring meta teams to censor Covid-related posts
US: Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that the Biden-Harris administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta’s teams to remove postings connected to Covid in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee. The platform needed to make adjustments that, “with the benefit of hindsight and new information,” the CEO of Meta said. These adjustments would not be made today. He continued by saying that he “regrets” not being “more outspoken” about it.
What is the whole matter?
Senior Biden Administration officials, including those from the White House, put a lot of pressure on our teams in 2021 to restrict certain COVID-19 material, including satire and comedy, and they were quite irate with us when we didn’t comply. In the end, we owned the decision to remove material, including the adjustments we made to our enforcement in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Zuckerberg said in the letter, as reported by media.
“I regret that we were not more vocal about the government’s pressure because I think it was wrong. In addition, I believe we made several decisions that we wouldn’t make now that we had the benefit of hindsight and fresh knowledge. We believe firmly that we should not compromise our content standards in response to pressure from any Administration, and we’re prepared to fight back if anything similar occurs again, as I said to our staff at the time,” he continued.
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.
Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024
Zuckerberg’s letter on X was made public by the Republican House Committee on the Judiciary. “Mark Zuckerberg just made three admissions: 1. Facebook was “pressured” to filter Americans by the Biden-Harris administration. 2. Americans were blocked by Facebook. 3. Facebook censored the report about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Great victory for free expression,” the caption said.
In the letter, Zuckerberg also said that before to the 2020 election, the FBI had alerted Meta about a possible Russian misinformation campaign concerning the Biden family and Burism. A report on the Biden family’s alleged corruption was later downgraded by Meta. Zuckerberg countered that the item wasn’t Russian misinformation and that it shouldn’t have been downgraded.
“We referred the New York Post article on then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s family’s alleged corruption to fact-checkers for assessment that autumn, and we temporarily downgraded it while we awaited a response. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have degraded the item, given it has subsequently been shown that the reporting was not Russian misinformation,” Zuckerberg said.
