Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the White House pressured the social media platform to censor Americans.
Zuckerberg’s admission comes in a letter to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), where he wrote, “There’s a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position.”
He wrote that 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.”
Despite acknowledging that the platform faced “pressure” from the Biden administration, Zuckerberg said that it was “ultimately” the platform’s decision 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 added he “regret[s] that we were not more outspoken about it.”
He felt “strongly” at the time that Facebook “should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction.” Meta is “ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg noted.
He also explained that the FBI “warned” Facebook about a “potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election,” adding that in “retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Zuckerberg then addressed his contributions to the 2020 election cycle. “The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic,” he wrote. While the contributions were “designed to be non-partisan,” he noted that “some people believe this work benefited one party over the other.”
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” he explained. “So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”
When asked for a comment, the White House told Fox News that the “administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety” during the COVID-19 pandemic. “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.”
