Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was influenced by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he experienced in 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration from either side – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

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

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the White House representative.

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

That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

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

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

In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities 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.” Zuckerberg said his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

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

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

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide 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 ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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