In a letter to the US Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that the Joe Biden-led US government “repeatedly pressured” Meta to censor certain content on its platforms.
In a letter addressed to the US House of Representatives, Mr Zuckerberg said the platform had to make some changes that “with the benefit of past experience and new information,” they would not make today. He said he regretted not being “more vocal” about this.
“In 2021, senior officials in 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 great disappointment to our teams when we did not agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether to remove content, and we own our decisions, including any COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was misplaced and I regret we were not more vocal about it,” the letter reads.
Zuckerberg said he believes Meta should not compromise its content standards due to pressure from any administration. He added, “If something like this happens again, we are prepared to fight it.”
Meta CEO also spoke about the FBI’s warning about a “possible disinformation campaign by Russia regarding the Biden family and Burisma ahead of the 2020 election.”
He said, “In the autumn of that year when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving the family of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, we sent the story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily removed it while we awaited a response. It has since become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have removed the story. We have changed our policies and procedures to make sure this doesn’t happen again; for example, we no longer temporarily remove things in the US while we wait for fact-checkers.”
Mr Zuckerberg reiterated his support for election infrastructure ahead of the presidential election in November. He said he has worked to strengthen the infrastructure in a non-partisan manner. “I know some people believe this work has favored one party over the other. My goal is to remain neutral and not play a role in any way or even be seen to play a role. So I don’t plan to make any such contributions this cycle,” he said.