Mark Zuckerberg Claims He Regrets Buckling to White House Censorship Pressures
Zuckerberg has written to the House Judiciary Committee. Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
Key Takeaways
- Mark Zuckerberg has said the Biden Administration pressured Meta to remove social media content.
- Zuckerberg said he regrets caving into White House demands.
- Meta is ‘ready to push back’ against the government in the future, he claimed.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken out about the Biden administration’s requests that it remove content related to COVID-19 vaccines.
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he believed the government pressure was wrong and regretted not standing up to it more.
How the White House Shaped Meta Policy
Zuckerberg’s comments represent the first time he has publicly acknowledged that the White House may have crossed a line in its efforts to suppress certain viewpoints online.
Allegations that Meta censored conservative views at the government’s request have been around since 2020, and much of what is known about the practice emerged through a lawsuit filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana.
Although the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the states lacked standing to bring suit, Missouri v. Biden highlighted the extent to which the White House shaped social media platforms’ content moderation regimes.
The case revealed a treasure trove of email exchanges between social media executives and Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media.
Under pressure from Flaherty to prevent the spread of “vaccine hesitancy,” Meta enacted a policy change that included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.”
Zuckerberg Claims Meta ‘Ready to Push Back’ in Future
Elaborating on the White House strong-arming identified by Missouri v. Biden, Zuckerberg’s latest letter admits that in 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration “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.”
“We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” he admitted.
Acknowledging his regret, Zuckerberg said Meta is “ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Meta Downranked Reporting on Hunter Biden
The letter also attends to allegations that Meta intentionally demoted a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s controversial relationship with the Ukrainian firm Burisma.
According to Zuckerberg, Meta temporarily demoted the story while fact-checkers were reviewing it amid a heightened risk of Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
However, “it’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he said.
Responding to Accusations of Partisanship
By acknowledging missteps in the way Meta handled two politically fraught issues, Zuckerberg’s letter responded to accusations that the company’s moderation policies espouse pro-Democratic bias.
Zuckerberg expressed regret over the suppression of conservative voices and commented on contributions he made during the 2020 election cycle.
The donations were intended “to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic,” he said. However, critics have argued that the campaign disproportionately boosted the Democratic vote.
In a bid to change the narrative and recast himself as non-partisan, Zuckerberg said he won’t make a similar contribution this time. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another,” the letter stated.
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