Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Monday that his social media company wrongly caved to government demands to “censor” COVID posts, saying his team was “frustrated” by demands by the Biden administration to crack down on so-called “disinformation,” but went along with it anyway at the point of a government gun.
The Huffington Post reports:
In a letter addressed to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which published the correspondence in full on its social media accounts, Zuckerberg said senior officials in Biden’s administration, including the White House, repeatedly urged the company “to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree."
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” continued Zuckerberg, whose parent company Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram. “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 also added that Meta never should have censored the New York Post’s now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story back in 2020, which pointed to evidence on Biden’s laptop that he and his father may have been abusing then-Vice President Joe Biden’s power to influence their family’s business dealings overseas. Many top Democrats, including then-House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, discredited the legitimate story as “Russian disinformation,” prompting obedient left-leaning social media companies like Meta and Google to censor the story and punish users who shared it while the legacy media networks refused to cover the story.
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Following the 2020 presidential election, a Media Research Center poll found 36 percent of Biden voters said they weren't aware of the evidence linking Joe Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter, and that 13 percent of these voters (or 4.6% of Biden’s total vote) say that had they known those allegations, they would not have voted for Joe Biden - a percentage large enough to have swung the election in Donald Trump's favor.
Zuckerberg now says he regrets the decision to censor the story - four years too late.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he wrote in his letter. “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 U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
He now says his goal “is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role” in promoting one political party over another.
For whatever that's worth now - in face, MRC found that Facebook has meddled in U.S. elections at least 39 times since 2008. So there's that.
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