In a letter to the US Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that the US government under Joe Biden “repeatedly pressured” Meta to censor certain content on its platforms.
In the letter addressed to US House of Representatives, Mr Zuckerberg said that the platform had to make some changes, that “with the benefit of hindsight and new information,” they won’t make today. He added that he regrets not being “more outspoken” about it.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. 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. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” the letter read.
Zuckerberg said he felt that Meta should not compromise its content standards due to pressure from any Administration. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” he said.
The Meta CEO also spoke of a FBI warning about a “potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”
“That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted 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. 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 US while waiting for fact-checkers,” he said.
Mr Zuckerberg reiterated his support for the electoral infrastructure ahead of the presidential elections in November. He spoke of he made to strengthen the infrastructure in a non-partisan way. “I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle,” he said.
