Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret for bowing to what he describes as pressure from the US government to censor Covid-related content on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg reported that senior officials from Joe Biden’s administration aggressively urged Meta, which oversees both 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, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said in a letter to Jim Jordan, the head of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. “I believe the government pressure was wrong.”
Facebook responded to the pandemic by placing misinformation warnings on posts judged to contain inaccurate Covid information and by removing posts critical of Covid vaccines or that suggested the virus was developed in a Chinese lab.
During the 2020 US presidential election campaign, Biden criticized social media platforms like Facebook for contributing to deaths by allowing false information about Covid vaccines to spread.
“I think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” Zuckerberg said. “I regret we were not more outspoken about it.”
“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 are ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Additionally, Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook had “temporarily demoted” a story regarding a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the president’s son, following an FBI warning about a potential Russian disinformation campaign targeting the Bidens.
He noted that it later became evident that the story was not disinformation, stating, “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
The House Judiciary Committee, currently led by Republicans, lauded Zuckerberg’s admission as a significant victory for free speech on its Facebook page.
The White House defended its pandemic actions, stating it promoted “responsible measures to safeguard public health and safety.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent,” it said. “We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people while making independent choices about the information they present.”
