Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged on Monday that the Biden administration has pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 related content, and acknowledged that it was a mistake to suppress The Washington Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's infamous laptop.
In a shocking letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg wrote that “senior Biden Administration officials, including from the White House, repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to 'censor' content related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Facebook's founder said the content the Biden administration asked Meta to remove contained “humor and satire” and that he regretted complying with that specific request.
“I think the government pressure was misguided and I regret that we were not more vocal about it,” he wrote. “I also think that, with hindsight and new information, we made choices that we would not have made today.”
Zuckerberg, 40, vowed that things would change if similar requests were made by governments in the future.
“As I told my team then, I feel strongly that our content standards should not be compromised due to pressure from the Administration, and we are prepared to fight back if something like this happens again,” he wrote.
Zuckerberg also added that it was a mistake to suppress The Washington Post's exclusive story about Hunter Biden's infamous laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
Hunter told the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating Facebook's content moderation practices, that before the company's decision to restrict the sharing of the explosive news in October 2020, the FBI had “warned” Mehta about a “potential Russian disinformation operation” linked to the Biden family and Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sits.
“That fall, when we saw a New York Post story about corruption allegations involving the family of then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, we sent the story to our fact-checkers for review and temporarily downgraded it while we waited for a response.” Zuckerberg wrote:.
“It later became clear that this report was not Russian disinformation. In retrospect, we should not have taken this news lightly,” he acknowledged.
Zuckerberg assured Jordan that Meta had put policies in place to ensure a similar censorship of a post “won't happen again.”
“We have changed our policies and processes to ensure this never happens again. For example, we will no longer temporarily lower our ranking in the US while we wait for fact checkers,” the billionaire tech entrepreneur claimed.
Zuckerberg's letter to Jordan is a much stronger admission that the Washington Post mishandled the laptop exposé than he did on Joe Rogan's podcast in 2022, when he said it was “unfortunate that the story was suppressed when it wasn't Russian disinformation.”
“Fact checkers looked at it after the fact and no one could say it was false, but I think that would suck, just like being put on criminal trial and ultimately being proven innocent,” Meta's CEO told Logan.
“I think the process was pretty reasonable,” he added, but still defended the censorship efforts. “But a lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints about it.”
The Washington Post's reporting on Hunter's abandoned laptop revealed tens of thousands of emails between the president's son and his business associates, showing how he used his political connections in overseas business deals.
Zuckerberg also said he does not plan to spend more than another $400 million to fund local elections this cycle after the so-called “Zuckerbucks” initiative was sharply criticized by Republicans as an attempt to influence the 2020 election.
“This operation spanned urban, rural and suburban communities and was designed to be non-partisan,” he said of the motivation, “but I am aware that there are some who believe this operation favored one political party, when the analysis I have seen indicates otherwise.”
“My goal is to remain neutral and not play or appear to play a role in either direction, so I will not be making a similar contribution this term.”
