Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash
CV NEWS FEED // Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted this week that his company censored election-related posts in the leadup to the 2020 election and in 2021 after communications from the FBI and later the Biden-Harris Administration.
In an August 26 letter addressed to Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg expressed his regret about the censorship and denounced the pressure the Biden-Harris Administration imposed on the company at the time.
The X account for the House Committee on the Judiciary, Republicans, posted a copy of the letter on August 26.
In the letter, Zuckerberg mentioned the infamous case in which “the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”
Zuckerberg admitted that before the November election, Meta temporarily demoted a story from The New York Post about corruption in President Joe Biden’s family while waiting for “fact-checkers” to respond about the story.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote, noting that changes have since been made to prevent similarly wrong actions in the future.
“Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure,” Zuckerberg wrote in the final paragraph of his letter:
The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan – spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities.
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 to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.
Zuckerberg’s letter also addressed Meta’s censoring of certain posts about COVID-19.
“In 2021,” he wrote, “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.”
Zuckerberg continued that his company takes responsibility for the final decision to remove the content.
“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,” he wrote. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it.”
Zuckerberg also wrote that Meta is “ready to push back” against government interference in the future:
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 any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.
As CatholicVote reported in February, internal emails published by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, revealed that the Biden Administration pressured Amazon to “‘remove books’ with purported ‘misinformation’” and that many of those books included views that did not align with President Joe Biden’s response to COVID-19.
