A White House spokesman said the Biden administration had urged tech entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg to hold his meta platform accountable, despite the latter saying he had been “pressured” to “censor” certain content.
The House Judiciary Committee recently released a letter from Zuckerberg about the Biden-Harris administration's repeated requests to censor content related to COVID-19 and vaccines, even satire.
“This administration has encouraged responsible behavior to protect public health and safety.”
“For months, senior Biden Administration officials, including from the White House, repeatedly pressured our team to censor specific COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed significant frustration with our team when we did not agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2021.
When asked, the White House backed away from the issue, not acknowledging that Zuckerberg used language about censorship or pressure.
“When faced with a deadly pandemic, this Administration has encouraged responsible behavior to protect public health and safety,” a White House spokesman said. Guardian.
White House officials later argued that it is the responsibility of tech platforms to make “independent” choices about the content that gets posted on their apps.
“Our position has been clear and consistent,” the statement continued, “We believe that tech companies and other private actors should consider the impact of their actions on the American people and make autonomous choices about the information they provide.”
The White House issued a similar statement to all media members.
The administration's denial of any form of censorship contradicts information obtained by social media companies such as Elon Musk's X Platform, which released its Twitter files. Those documents exposed the federal government's interest in suppressing certain news, including that related to Hunter Biden's laptop.
Zuckerberg also complained about the same issues in a letter to the committee's chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Zuckerberg wrote that the FBI had “warned the company about potential Russian disinformation” about the Biden family and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
The CEO acknowledged that his team had “temporarily downgraded” an article posted on his platform.
He also said it later became clear that “the report was not Russian disinformation.”
During the same term, the Biden-Harris administration also attempted to establish a disinformation control committee to monitor speech. Shut down The company shut down the controversial disinformation message board after widespread backlash that it was reminiscent of Soviet-style censorship of public speech.
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