‘Regret We Weren’t More Outspoken’: Zuckerberg Claims Biden Admin Pressured Meta To Censor

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accused the Biden administration of “repeatedly pressuring” the company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to “censor” certain Covid-19 content during the pandemic.

“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,” he wrote in his letter to US House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan on Monday.

Zuckerberg further noted that when Facebook did not comply with the censorship requests, the Biden administration expressed frustration.

“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 said.

Meta founder expressed regret for not being more vocal about the “government pressure” to remove Covid-19-related content. “I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

‘Ready to push back’

He further stated that Meta should “not compromise” its content standards due to any administration’s pressure and affirmed the company’s readiness to resist such pressure in the future.

“Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens,” he wrote.

Reflecting on past decisions, he said, “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

In his letter, Zuckerberg also admitted that Meta should not have “demoted” a New York Post story about corruption allegations involving President Joe Biden’s family ahead of the 2020 presidential election while waiting for fact-checkers.

“We sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he added.