After years of bickering with the Biden administration about vaccine misinformation, Mark Zuckerberg has now accused the White House of “repeatedly” pressuring Facebook for months “to censor certain COVID-19 content” in 2021 that Facebook supposedly would not have taken down without pressure.
In a letter to the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Monday, the Meta CEO claimed that senior officials from the Biden administration “expressed a lot of frustration” when Facebook pushed back on certain content removal requests. According to Zuckerberg, the Biden administration didn’t just want misinformation taken down, but also “humor and satire.”
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote, taking accountability for his platform’s actions.
However, if Facebook was put in the same situation again—by any presidential administration—Zuckerberg claimed that his platform is now “ready to push back” and resist compromising its content standards.
I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg’s letter said, while also admitting to demoting the Hunter Biden laptop story and changing Facebook’s policies so that also won’t happen again.
In a statement reported by The Seattle Times, the White House seemed just as ready to continue pushing back on Zuckerberg’s allegations that Facebook’s content removals were coerced.
“When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” the White House said. Our position has been clear and consistent: 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.”
Zuckerberg’s letter “big win for free speech,” GOP says
Since Facebook’s grudge match with the Biden administration started, conservatives have increasingly accused Meta of censoring right-leaning views. They even fought for an injunction that would stop the Biden administration from contacting platforms like Facebook and allegedly pressuring them into removing content that Democrats view unfavorably.
But the Supreme Court in June tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that because Facebook “began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID-19 content” before the government pressure campaign began, platforms, not the Biden administration, bore responsibility for the posts being taken down.
In 2021, Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook early on had committed to removing COVID-19 misinformation, ramping up content takedowns right when the pandemic started, The New York Times reported. After just over one year into the pandemic, Facebook had removed more than 20 million pieces of content that violated its ever-tightening COVID-19 policies, Bloomberg reported.
