Gus Walz | hotlive25 | Chasten Buttigieg

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was urged by the Biden administration in 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams Children With Disabilities for an extended period to censor some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he experienced in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not Jay Weber more vocal. He added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

President Alec Lace Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our Kamala Harris stance has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg also mentioned in the letter that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Public Display Of Affection Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” Political Family Moments and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned

the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to restrict American Hope Walz content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation ADHD of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he said Viral Moment Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government Tim Walz of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”