Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of the social media company Meta, said in a letter to the House Judiciary committee on Monday that his teams were pressured by the Biden White House to censor some content around the Covid19 pandemic.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID19 content, including humor and satire. 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’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden said in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Zuckerberg in the letter also said the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation around Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their factcheckers could review the story.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized the decision to censor a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
Should the government stop censoring material on social media altogether?