During the height of the pandemic, Meta scrubbed tens of millions of items on Facebook and Instagram that it said pushed misinformation on COVID-19, vaccinations, and the like, with warnings placed on nearly 200 million more pieces of content. Now, the company's CEO is saying that the Biden administration exerted pressure on them to stifle such content, and that it was "wrong" to do so, reports Axios. "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," Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Monday letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, a Republican. Zuckerberg added: "I regret that we were not more outspoken about it."
Zuckerberg also said Meta shouldn't have demoted a controversial New York Post article regarding corruption allegations against the Biden family while it waited for independent fact-checkers, after the FBI had warned the social media company of a "potential Russian disinformation operation." "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 wrote. Zuckerberg added that, even though he has donated hundreds of millions in the past to support election infrastructure in the past, he wouldn't going forward, as "my goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role," per CBS News.
Axios notes that social media sites played a vital part in helping tamp down on COVID and vaccine misinformation, but Republicans are now hailing Zuckerberg's latest message as a "big win for free speech," after a longtime insistence that tech firms and social media platforms have been censoring conservative views, per CBS. The AP reports that the White House has responded to Zuckerberg's claims, noting in a statement: "When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present." (More Mark Zuckerberg stories.)
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