Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, the parent company that owns Facebook, sent a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, on Monday acknowledging that Meta censored Americans at the behest of the Biden-Harris administration and throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election.
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While the news likely doesn’t come as a terrible surprise to most reading this article, the forthright acknowledgment — and seeming expression of regret — from Zuck himself is fascinating.
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It’s only two pages, which can be viewed in the tweet above, but here are a couple of key passages:
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. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from the Administration in either direction – and we are ready to push back if something like this happens again.
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us 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 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 fat checkers.
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Zuckerberg also addressed the 2020 use of “Zuckerbucks,” which he deemed resources designed to assist with election infrastructure.
Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, 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 even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.
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Again, that Facebook engaged in censorship over COVID and throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story isn’t news. However, these frank admissions by Zuckerberg to the Judiciary Committee add a new dimension to the ongoing issue of social media platforms and government censorship. One can’t help but wonder at what is motivating this new approach.