Zuckerberg Says He Regrets Actions After Biden Administration Pressure to Censor
In a letter to Congressman Jim Jordan, Mark Zuckerberg admitted the Biden administration pressured Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 information and that FBI warnings about Russian disinformation resulted in Facebook demoting a true New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop (other platforms went beyond demoting).
“In 2021, senior administrations in 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,” he wrote.
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. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.
He spoke of the FBI warnings on “Russian disinformation,” which he had previously revealed to Joe Rogan, coloring Facebook’s approach to the Hunter Biden laptop story. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he explained in the letter. “We’ve 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 also explained that he would make no donation to any massive get-out-the-vote drive in 2024 as he did in 2020, which he did then, he claimed, because of the challenges of COVID-19.
This post is an excerpt from Dan Flynn’s daily newsletter, the Spectator A.M. Subscribe here to receive the full newsletter in your email inbox every morning, Monday through Friday.
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