Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed regret over what he describes as yielding to pressure from the U.S. government to censor COVID-19 content on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg revealed that top White House officials in the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain COVID-19 content” throughout the pandemic.
In a letter addressed to Jim Jordan, the chair of the U.S. House of Representatives judiciary committee, Zuckerberg stated, “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. I believe the government pressure was wrong.”
@JudiciaryGOP (House Judiciary GOP) “Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big win for free speech.”
Twitter August 26, 2024 https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064
During the pandemic, Facebook took steps to label posts with misinformation alerts if users commented on or liked posts that were deemed to contain false information regarding Covid-19. The platform also removed posts that criticized Covid vaccines and suggested the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory.
In the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, President Biden accused social media platforms like Facebook of “killing people” by allowing disinformation about coronavirus vaccines to circulate on their platforms.
Reflecting on the decisions made during that time, Zuckerberg said, “I think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. I regret we were not more outspoken about it.”
