Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Facebook implemented a censorship regime to suppress American speech under pressure from the federal government.
On Monday, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee outlining the myriad ways Facebook aided federal officials in a censorship campaign to crack down on dissident content related to the coronavirus pandemic and Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.
“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. “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.”
Zuckerberg said he believes the government pressure campaign was inappropriate.
“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.”
“We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” the tech CEO added.
Zuckerberg also wrote that Facebook suppressed stories related to Hunter Biden’s laptop in the final weeks of the 2020 election on behalf of federal officials within the FBI. That fall, the New York Post published a series of emails from an abandoned Delaware laptop which contradicted then-candidate Joe Biden’s repeated claims of never speaking business with his son, “or with anyone else,” on the campaign trail. Emails show the former vice president had in fact met with Hunter Biden’s business partners.
“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.”
“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” the Meta CEO wrote to the Judiciary Committee. “For instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
A Supreme Court decision handed down in June, however, greenlit the federal censorship regime when justices ruled 6-3 in Murthy v. Missouri that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the government’s programs suppressing citizen speech. Missouri leaders had challenged White House censorship operations, citing “over 1,400 facts from more than 20,000 pages of evidence exposing the vast censorship enterprise coordinated across multiples agencies within the federal government.”
Zuckerberg had previously admitted to colluding with FBI officials during the 2020 election during a podcast interview with Joe Rogan.
“The FBI basically came to us and spoke to some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda on the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that,’” Zuckerberg said in 2022.
“I think it was 5 to 7 days when it was basically being determined whether it was false,” he added, without disclosing which third parties conducted the network’s so-called fact check. But “fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.”
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