Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to resist White House pressure on censorship, revealing in a damning letter how the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor accounts promoting COVID-19 misinformation.
In a Monday letter addressed to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, the billionaire said he regrets working with the administration to censor content on his platforms. “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 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.”
In his letter, Zuckerberg recalled that the FBI warned Meta about a potential Russian disinformation operation targeting the Biden family and Burisma ahead of the 2020 election. As a result, Meta demoted posts alleging corruption involving Joe Biden’s family (the Hunter Biden laptop story) while they were being analysed by fact-checkers.
However, Zuckerberg claims the reporting was not Russian disinformation and should not have been demoted. Zuckerberg noted Meta has since “changed our policies and processes to ensure this doesn’t happen again”. “We no longer temporarily demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.”