Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Monday that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content and acknowledged it was wrong to stifle The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Zuckerberg wrote that “senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Meta to “censor” content related to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.
The content the Biden administration requested that Meta take down included “humor and satire,” according to the Facebook founder, and he said he regrets complying with certain demands.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg, 40, vowed that things will be different in future should the government make similar requests.
“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,” he wrote.
Zuckerberg separately added that suppressing The Post’s exclusive report on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop ahead of the 2020 election was a mistake.
He explained to the House Judiciary Committee, which has been probing Facebook’s content moderation standards, that prior to the decision to limit sharing of the bombshell October 2020 story, the FBI had “warned” Meta about “a potential Russian disinformation operation” related to the Biden family and Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, where Hunter sat on the board of directors.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he acknowledged.
Zuckerberg assured Jordan that Meta has put policies in place to ensure that similar censorship of stories “doesn’t happen again.”
“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,” the billionaire tech entrepreneur claimed.
Zuckerberg’s letter to Jordan is a far stronger admission that mistakes were made in the way his company handled The Post’s laptop exposé than the tech titan’s 2022 concession on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he said, “it sucks” that the story was suppressed when it was not in fact Russian disinformation.
“It turned out after the fact, the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false … I think it sucks, though, in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks,” the Meta CEO told Rogan.
“I think the process was pretty reasonable,” he added, still defending the censorship effort. “A lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case.”
The Post’s report on Hunter’s abandoned laptop revealed the existence of tens of thousands of emails between the president’s son and business associates, which showed how the first son leveraged his political access in his overseas business dealings.
Zuckerberg also said he doesn’t plan on spending another $400 million-plus to help finance local elections this cycle after the so-called “Zuckerbucks” initiative was roundly criticized by Republicans as an attempt to influence the 2020 vote.
“They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities,” he said of his motives. “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.”
