Mark Zuckerberg Says Biden Admin ‘Repeatedly Pressured’ Facebook To ‘Censor’ Content, ‘Including Humor and Satire’
AP Photo/David Zalubowski
Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed on Monday that President Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured” the social network to “censor” content, “including humor and satire” the administration objected to.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Zuckerberg claimed that, “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 continued:
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. 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.
In the same letter, Zuckerberg also expressed regret over Facebook’s decision to demote the 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was falsely accused of being “Russian disinformation” at the time.
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
“The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election,” wrote Zuckerberg. “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.”
He concluded, “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.”
The House Judiciary Committee published Zuckerberg’s letter on social media and described it as “a big win for free speech.”
