By James Myers, OAN Staff
Tuesday, August 27, 2024 11:36 AM
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter on Monday that the Biden administration has strongly pressured Facebook to censor online content related to COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines for the virus.
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In a shocking letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Zuckerberg said the omission was a result of “senior Biden Administration officials, including from the White House, repeatedly pressuring Meta to 'censor' content related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
This comes more than a year after Zuckerberg provided the committee with hundreds of thousands of documents as part of an investigation into online platforms' censorship of certain political topics.
According to Zuckerberg, the COVID-19-related content and requests highlighted by the Biden administration included any posts related to “humor and satire.” Nevertheless, the CEO stressed that he regrets complying with these requests.
“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.”
When Facebook did not agree to the censorship, Zuckerberg said the Biden administration expressed dissatisfaction.
“Ultimately, our decision whether to remove content is ours and we take responsibility for our decisions, including the COVID-19-related modifications we made to our enforcement approach in response to this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I believe the government pressure was misguided, and I regret not being more vocal about it.”
“And with the benefit of hindsight and new information, I believe we made some choices that we wouldn't have made today,” he added. “As I told my team at the time, I feel strongly that we should not cave in to pressure from the Administration to compromise our content standards, and we are prepared to fight back when something like this happens.”
The White House spokesman Fox News“In the face of a deadly pandemic, this Administration has 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 consider the impact of their actions on the American people and make their own choices about the information they provide.”
But Facebook's founder vowed that the company would not make the same mistake if governments made similar requests in the future.
“As I told my team then, I feel strongly that our content standards should not be compromised in response to pressure from the Administration, and we are prepared to fight back if something like this happens again,” he wrote.
The committee first issued a subpoena to Mehta on February 15 seeking documents and information.Number2023 lawsuit regarding content censorship and Meta's interactions with government agencies to censor speech.
At the time, the committee was investigating whether executive branch agencies, at the request of the government, had pressured or collaborated with private companies to suppress or remove certain types of speech, which could be considered a potential violation of the First Amendment.
Additionally, Zuckerberg admitted to censoring the story about Hunter Biden's laptop. New York Postas well as being reported by One America News Soon after, false claims citing “Russian disinformation” leapt to the forefront of media headlines, as mainstream media and big tech companies worked with the government to suppress any information related to the story.
The FBI also warned Mehta about a “possible Russian disinformation campaign” regarding the Biden family and Ukraine-based energy company Burisma in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, though this has now been proven false.
Facebook's founder said the article about Biden's family had been temporarily “downgraded” after fact-checkers reviewed the article and determined it to be false.
“It has since become clear that this report was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should never have downgraded this story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We have changed our policies and processes to ensure this never happens again. For example, we will no longer temporarily downgrade stories in the US while we wait for fact checkers.”
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