RFK was 'desperate for attention': Howard Kurtz
“MediaBuzz” host Howard Kurtz explained why Vice President Kamala Harris should be interviewed by Fox News and responded to former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s endorsement of former President Trump on “The Story.”
Mark Zuckerberg has had to make big mistakes many times.
And a little political mayhem wasn't on the agenda.
As The Wall Street Journal As first reported, the CEOs of Facebook and Meta expressed regret over serious issues such as government censorship and free speech.
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It's good that Zuckerberg is accepting some responsibility, but it's a little late — about three years too late.
The admission, made in a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, is a major win for Republicans, a former Harvard genius who typically plays defensively while making vague promises of future reform.
Zuckerberg wrote that since the pandemic began, Biden administration officials and White House officials “repeatedly pressured our team for months to censor specific COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed significant frustration with our team when we did not agree.”
A side-by-side photo of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and US President Joe Biden. (Getty Images)
This is an important distinction: Biden's pressure tactics haven't always worked — Facebook could have said no, and sometimes it did — but most of the time, the social media giant just caved.
And Facebook has publicly declared its plans to encourage millions of people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Zuckerberg said the administration's pressure was “mistakeable, and we regret not speaking out more.” The company added that with “hindsight and new information, we made choices that we would not make today…We feel strongly that our content standards should not be compromised because of pressure from the administration, and we stand ready to fight back if this happens again.”
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I don't know, but how confident are you that Facebook would publicly speak out against a hot button issue today?
A Biden administration spokesman, in legalistic language that was largely unresponsive to Zuckerberg's accusations, said, “We have encouraged responsible behavior to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe technology companies and other private actors should make independent choices about the information they provide, while considering the impact of their actions on the American people.”
Two years ago, a Free Press reporter investigating the “Twitter Files” found that both the Trump and Biden administrations “directly pressured Twitter executives to moderate pandemic-related content in line with their wishes.”
One document mentioned the White House chief technology officer who “led calls for technology companies to help the Trump Administration combat misinformation.”
The photo illustration shows the Facebook logo on a computer screen with a hand holding a medical syringe in front of it. (Pablo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The article also said that Facebook, Google and Microsoft held “weekly” conference calls with Trump administration officials to discuss the companies' “general trends” — which sounds like a euphemism.
But Trump was also a victim: Just four hours after a video from his 2020 campaign was posted and viewed 500,000 times, Facebook removed it for violating the company's policies banning misinformation about the coronavirus.
The Trump campaign posted footage of a Fox interview in which the president said children are “virtually immune” to the coronavirus, something most medical experts disagreed with at the time.
“For some reason, they have a much stronger immune system than we do,” Trump said. “They don't have a problem. They just don't have a problem.”
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At the time, a White House spokesman called the move “another display of Silicon Valley's blatant bias against the president and the rules being only being enforced one-sidedly.”
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg also broke the news about Hunter Biden's laptop.
He told Jordan that Mehta “should not have downgraded” the New York Post story about the laptop so soon before the 2020 election.
Let’s stop there: “Demotion” is a technical term for suppressing a story and burying it in plain sight so that most users don’t see it. This happened after Twitter blocked The Post’s story entirely.
Former President Trump arrived to speak at a campaign rally in Bozeman, Montana on Friday, August 9. (AP/Rick Bowmer)
When Biden was the Democratic nominee, Trump aides obtained the laptop from a Delaware computer store owner. Dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter denying the laptop story was fake, and during a debate with Trump, Biden said the release of the emails “bears all the classic hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.”
“It has since become clear that this report was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, I should never have downgraded this story,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Yes, and it took another year and a half for The New York Times and The Washington Post to “authenticate” the laptop's contents.
During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg funded nonprofits to set up COVID-19-era voting booths and mail-in ballot sorting equipment that Republicans dubbed “Zuckerbucks” and legitimately argued unfairly benefited Democratic areas. Zuckerberg now says he won't do it again this time.
In a post last month, Trump said, “All I can say is that if I am elected President I will pursue election fraudsters with unprecedented force and impose long prison sentences. We already know who you are. Don't do it! Zuckerbax, watch out!”
In an interview with me at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made his distaste for Facebook clear, and in fact used Facebook to backtrack on his opposition to banning TikTok, arguing that it would only help Zuckerberg's company.
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Some may dismiss all of this as old news, given that it dates back to the pandemic and the last election, but it raises fundamental questions that continue to resonate today, with many liberals leaving or all but abandoning X in the wake of Elon Musk's endorsement of Trump to join Zuckerberg's copycat site, Threads.
Politicians and special interests routinely lobby the federal government, but it's deeply disturbing that they would use their considerable influence to pressure big tech companies secretly, behind closed doors, and hidden from the public.
