Zuckerberg Accuses Biden For Pressuring Meta To Censor Covid Content

Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO, accused the Biden administration for repeatedly pressuring the company to “censor” certain Covid-19 content during the pandemic time. 

“We Made To Our Enforcement In The Wake Of This Pressure”

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

“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 while addressing Biden’s frustration over Facebook for not complying to the censor requests.

Zuckerberg shows his contentment for being 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,” he added.

He went on to say that Meta should “not compromise” its content standards just for the sake of Biden’s administration’s pressure and affirmed the Meta’s readiness to resist future pressures to censor content.

Zuckerberg Feels They Shouldn’t Compromise 

“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 noted.

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

Moreover, Zuckerberg also acknowledged that Meta’s decision to “demote” a New York Post story on President Joe Biden’s family corruption allegations before the 2020 election was a mistake.

while waiting for fact-checker input, he added, “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,”

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