Meta was ‘pressured’ by White House to censor Covid-related content in 2021: Mark Zuckerberg

“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter.

Zuckerberg, in his letter to the judiciary committee, said the pressure he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he came to “regret” that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken.

He added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information” there were decisions made in 2021 that wouldn’t be made 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,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter.

The US President Joe Biden said in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though President Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

Responding to Zuckerberg’s letter, a White House spokesperson said the administration at the time was encouraging “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,” the spokesperson said.

Mark Zuckerberg also said in the letter that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the domestic intelligence and security service of the US, warned Meta about potential Russian disinformation around Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Joe Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story, according to reports.

The Meta CEO said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers, reports CNN.

Zuckerberg, in the letter to the Judiciary Committee, said he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“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 pandemic,” the Meta CEO said.

Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but he said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.”

He said his goal is to be “neutral” so will not be “making a similar contribution this cycle.”

Members of The Republican Party, which is also known as GOP, on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Mark Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

Zuckerberg has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives, reports CNN.

While the Meta chief has stressed that his company enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles, CNN reported, adding that Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

Zuckerberg, in testimony before Congress in recent years, has sought to bridge the divide between his social media giant and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, the Meta CEO acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning, but he held that the social media company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, Zuckerberg said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area,” reports CNN.

In June 2024, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no standing, according to reports.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction,” as reported by CNN.

According to nonpartisan education group News Literacy Project, there have been over 500 instances of misinformation during the 2024 election cycle, including fake celebrity endorsements.