Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter on Monday that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly pressured his company — which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more — to censor content that is protected free speech.
Zuckerberg made the admission in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) this week in which he said that his goal moving forward was to “be neutral and not play a role one way or another” for either any political party or ideology. He said he doesn’t even want the appearance of playing a role and will not be making political contributions.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said in the letter. “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.”
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“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he continued. “I also think we made some choices that. with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, 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.”
He said that the company made a mistake by temporarily demoting a New York Post story during the 2020 election about Hunter Biden’s laptop after officials falsely suggested that it was part of a “Russian disinformation operation.”
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he said. “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.”
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He said that he does not plan on making any political contributions during this cycle after he gave money to support electoral infrastructure in 2020 that led to accusations that he was trying to help Democrats because of where the money was reportedly deployed.
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” he said. “So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”
