Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter on Monday admitted that his company, Facebook, was pressured by the Biden-Harris administration to censor online content, particularly regarding COVID-19 content.
Zuckerberg made the admission in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, more than a year after providing the committee with thousands of documents as part of its investigation into content moderation on online platforms.
Along with documents, the Meta CEO said, the company has provided a dozen employees to be available for transcribed interviews, stressing Meta’s cooperation with the investigation.
“There’s a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position,” Zuckerberg wrote. “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.”
He told Jordan that in 2021, “senior officials” from the Biden administration and White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.”
When Facebook did not agree with the censorship, Zuckerberg said, the Biden administration expressed a lot of frustration.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote. “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,” he added. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens.”
The committee first subpoenaed Meta for documents and information on Feb. 15, 2023, related to content moderation and Meta’s engagements with the executive branch to censor speech.
At the time, the committee was investigating whether, and to what extent, the executive branch pressured or worked with private companies to stifle or tamp down certain kinds of speech at the request of the government, which could potentially be a violation of the First Amendment.
He wrote that the FBI warned his company about “a potential Russian disinformation operation” regarding the Biden family and Burisma, leading up to the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg said a New York Post story that fall reported on corruption allegations involving Biden’s family, so they had fact-checkers review the story and temporarily demote it while waiting for a reply.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “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.”
