In a letter dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg, who owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, informed the House Judiciary Committee that in 2021, “senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” his teams to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire. During the summer of that year, as the administration ramped up efforts to vaccinate Americans against the virus, President Joe Biden publicly criticized social media companies like Facebook, accusing them of contributing to the spread of misinformation. “They’re killing people — I mean, really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden told reporters. “And they’re killing people.” In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta ultimately made its own decisions regarding content removal but expressed strong opposition to the administration's tactics. “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not 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 wrote.Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, has accused the Biden administration of engaging in an ongoing censorship campaign, alleging that it pressured his company to suppress content on its social media platforms.
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. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024 “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he added. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.” Zuckerberg also told the committee that the Biden administration interfered in the 2020 election by pressing platforms to censor an explosive story published by The New York Post detailing alleged corruption by the Biden family. After the election, survey data showed that had voters been aware of the story, Biden would have lost the election to former President Donald Trump.
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg just admitted to working with Biden/Harris admin to censor Americans.
He either admitted to this because:
1. He’s being honorable
2. He’s done with the Dem party
3. He’s getting ahead of a whistleblower
Either way this is a VERY HARD letter to write. pic.twitter.com/y64cOQjY15
— Patrick Bet-David (@patrickbetdavid) August 27, 2024
The FBI told Zuckerberg’s platforms that the story was Russian disinformation, which resulted in the company demoting it through its algorithm.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Rusisan disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’re changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
Zuckerberg’s written testimony corroborates a series of exposés dubbed “The Twitter Files” that used data obtained from that platform to confirm that the federal government regularly played an active role in pressuring social media companies to censor content.
