The Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor content on its platform relating to COVID-19 and other major stories, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed in a Monday letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Nevertheless, Zuckerberg admitted Facebook’s culpability in censorship that took place on the platform. “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. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
Zuckerberg’s letter comes a year after Meta, Facebook’s parent company, complied with documents requests from the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into private and public sector online censorship. According to Zuckerberg, the committee has procured thousands of documents and dozens of interviews from company employees over the course of the probe.
The Meta CEO then pivoted to another notable example of online censorship; namely, the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 presidential election. “In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and [Ukrainian energy giant] Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election,” Zuckerberg claimed.
When the New York Post released the Hunter Biden laptop story, Facebook “temporarily demoted it.”
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg continued. “We’ve changed our policies and process 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.”
The Facebook founder affirmed in the letter, “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.”
Kara Frederick, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center and who formerly led Facebook’s Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program, has her doubts. Though “his [Zuckerberg’s] instincts are less evil than his actual decisions,” Frederick claimed that Zuckerberg “is coming out in this conveniently timed way because he knows he will face no consequences for his platform’s eager acquiescence to government demands to censor Americans’ speech.”
“This is ultimately a deflection from how the platform operates to silence conservatives as we speak,” citing Facebook “‘mistakenly’ labeling the photo of Trump defiantly raising his fist in the air during his assassination attempt as ‘misinformation.’”
In a statement to Fox News, a White House spokesperson seemed to double-down on the Biden-Harris administration’s censorship efforts. “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” the spokesperson said. “Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”
