Emotional Moment | zucke27 | Acceptance Speech

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was pressured by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, including satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, constantly urged our Empathy teams for an extended period to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he experienced in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not

more vocal. He further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden Public Display Of Affection remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

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

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our Cyberbullying position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg further noted in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 ADHD election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.

Zuckerberg said 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 changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does Viral Moment not recur” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” Democratic National Convention stated the Meta CEO.

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

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook Special Education to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to Social Dominance restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

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

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, Online Bullying many of whom are contractors, are globally located and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of censoring conservative voices on Fox News social media had no standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”