Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg denounced in a letter to the US House Judiciary Committee the pressure he received from the Joe Biden administration during the pandemic for Meta’s social networks to censor certain comments.
“In 2021, senior officials in the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19-related content, including humor and satire, and expressed great frustration with our teams when ‘we disagreed,’” Zuckerberg said in a letter to the chairman of the committee, Republican lawmaker Jim Jordan.
Ultimately, he explained, it was Meta’s decision whether or not to remove the content, but “the government pressure was wrong,” added the American CEO, who regretted that the company had not been “more forthright.” At that time, he added, some decisions were made that “with hindsight and new information” Meta would not make today.
“As I told our teams at the time, I firmly believe that we should not compromise our content standards because of pressure from any administration in any direction, and we are prepared to fight back if something like this happens again,” he added in the letter, in which Zuckerberg said Meta’s goal is to “promote free expression and help people connect safely.”
A year ago, Zuckerberg had to provide the commission with thousands of documents on this subject as part of the investigation into content moderation on online platforms.
